An Autoethnographic Study of Online Class Size and Instructor Participation in Discussions

This research provided a detailed description of the researcher’s experience as an online instructor who faced increasing demands while trying to maintain instructional effectiveness. This account provided online program directors who sought to balance instructor satisfaction, accreditation standards, and financial pressures with insight into the impact of class size choices on instructor behavior in the online classroom. A qualitative autoethnographic method was used to understand the nature of the connection between class size and instructor use of instructional posts and to identify factors that influence the way instructors participate in online discussions. The autoethnographic genre of qualitative research allowed the researcher to create a compelling narrative that can inform the experiences of readers. Although the demands faced by instructors at different institutions will vary, the introspection required by the autoethnographic approach creates an understanding of the phenomenon that is credible and valid. The sample for this study was the researcher’s experience as an instructor at one university. A review of artifacts such as email, discussion posts, workplace calendar, a personal journal, and professional development logs and personal experience was used to generate a researcher journal. The researcher journal was used as a mechanism for identifying pertinent themes

Geographic Variation in Health Care: The Role of Private Markets

health care, public sector, Medicare, insurance

Examining the impact of critical attributes on hard drive failure times: Multi-state models for left-truncated and right-censored semi-competing risks data

\ua9 2023 The Authors. Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The ability to predict failures in hard disk drives (HDDs) is a major objective of HDD manufacturers since avoiding unexpected failures may prevent data loss, improve service reliability, and reduce data center downtime. Most HDDs are equipped with a threshold-based monitoring system named self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology (SMART). The system collects several performance metrics, called SMART attributes, and detects anomalies that may indicate incipient failures. SMART works as a nascent failure detection method and does not estimate the HDDs\u27 remaining useful life. We define critical attributes and critical states for hard drives using SMART attributes and fit multi-state models to the resulting semi-competing risks data. The multi-state models provide a coherent and novel way to model the failure time of a hard drive and allow us to examine the impact of critical attributes on the failure time of a hard drive. We derive dynamic predictions of conditional survival probabilities, which are adaptive to the state of the drive. Using a dataset of HDDs equipped with SMART, we find that drives are more likely to fail after entering critical states. We evaluate the predictive accuracy of the proposed models with a case study of HDDs equipped with SMART, using the time-dependent area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and the expected prediction error (PE). The results suggest that accounting for changes in the critical attributes improves the accuracy of dynamic predictions

Terminal Care and The Value of Life Near Its End

Medical care at the end of life, estimated to contribute up to a quarter of US health care spending, often encounters skepticism from payers and policy makers who question its high cost and often minimal health benefits. However, though many observers have claimed that such spending is often irrational and wasteful, little explicit analysis exists on the incentives that determine end of life health care spending. This paper attempts to provide the first rational and systematic analysis of the incentives behind end of life care. The main argument we make is that existing theoretical and empirical analysis of the value of life do not apply, and often under-values, the value of life near its end and terminal care. We argue that several factors drive up the value of life near its end including the low opportunity cost of medical spending near ones death, the value of hope including living into new innovations, and the potential positive effect of on the value of life from being frail. We calibrate the ex-post value of hope associated with treatments for HIV patients to be as much as four times as high as standard per-capita estimates of treatment effects and as many as two and a half times as high as aggregate values across all cohorts.

Dung beetles as hydrological engineers: effects of tunnelling on soil infiltration

1. Soil infiltration capacity determines the partitioning of precipitation into infiltration and overland flow and is therefore an important soil hydrological characteristic. Water infiltration through soil is facilitated by macropores created by roots and soil macrofauna. In clay-rich soils, such as those of the tropical forests of Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, most infiltration occurs via these preferential flow pathways. 2. We evaluated the effects of dung beetle tunnelling on infiltration and macropore creation (depth and width of the flow pathways) in tropical forest soils in Sabah. Using mesocosms, we applied three treatments (i) soil-only, (ii) dung-only, (iii) dung + dung beetles, and measured saturated hydraulic conductivity (i.e., the steady-state infiltration rate) after 0, 5 and 10 days, and assessed depth and width of infiltration pathways by applying a blue dye tracer. 3. The steady-state infiltration rate increased in the presence of dung beetles, though differences among treatments were only statistically significant after 10 days. After 5 days of dung beetle presence, infiltrated water had reached a greater depth than the control mesocosms without beetles. However, there were no differences in the width of infiltration pathways among treatments. 4. These results reveal the important, but under studied roles of dung beetles on soil hydrological functioning, that may have consequences for nutrient cycling and plant productivity. Further, our findings indicate that the novel application of an established hydrological method—blue dye tracer—can provide interesting and reliable results for macrofauna–soil interaction studies.ISSN:0307-6946ISSN:1365-231

Dung beetles as hydrological engineers: effects of tunnelling on soil infiltration

1. Soil infiltration capacity determines the partitioning of precipitationinto infiltration and overland flow and is therefore an important soil hydrologicalcharacteristic. Water infiltration through soil is facilitated by macropores created byroots and soil macrofauna. In clay-rich soils, such as those of the tropical forests ofSabah, Malaysian Borneo, most infiltration occurs via these preferential flow pathways. 2. We evaluated the effects of dung beetle tunnelling on infiltration and macroporecreation (depth and width of the flow pathways) in tropical forest soils in Sabah. Usingmesocosms, we applied three treatments (i) soil-only, (ii) dung-only, (iii) dung+dungbeetles, and measured saturated hydraulic conductivity (i.e., the steady-state infiltrationrate) after 0, 5 and 10 days, and assessed depth and width of infiltration pathways byapplying a blue dye tracer. 3. The steady-state infiltration rate increased in the presence of dung beetles, thoughdifferences among treatments were only statistically significant after 10 days. After5 days of dung beetle presence, infiltrated water had reached a greater depth than thecontrol mesocosms without beetles. However, there were no differences in the width ofinfiltration pathways among treatments. 4. These results reveal the important, but under studied roles of dung beetles on soilhydrological functioning, that may have consequences for nutrient cycling and plantproductivity. Further, our findings indicate that the novel application of an establishedhydrological method–blue dye tracer–can provide interesting and reliable results formacrofauna–soil interaction studies