Love Will Find Your Heart : Ballad

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/6049/thumbnail.jp

Effects of Transformational Leadership on Safety Performance in the United States Commercial Trucking Industry

The purpose of this study was to research whether the leadership styles of safety professionals, supervisory and management leaders of commercial trucking companies, were related to their companies’ safety ratings. The theoretical framework employed in this study was based on the full range leadership model of Avolio and Bass (1991). Sixty-two long-haul commercial truck drivers participated in the study. This quantitative research was a quasi-experimental, correlational study comparing leadership styles with safety indices of trucking companies. The leadership styles were determined using the 45-question Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) Rater Form (Avolio & Bass, 1991) and compared them to the safety indices of the participants’ trucking companies. The safety indices had two components, the companies’ safety ratings and their safety climate scores. The safety ratings were derived from the U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Safety Measurement System (SMS) database. The safety climate score was a content-validated 10-question Likert-scale survey derived from the Nordic Occupational Safety Climate Questionnaire (NOSACQ-50). Sixty-two truck drivers completed the MLQ Rater Forms and Safety Climate Scales. The study found that transformational leadership was negatively correlated to safety climates, and passive avoidant leadership had positive correlations to safety climates. These unexpected outcomes may be explained by the predisposition of long-haul truck drivers to share proactive, introverted personality types. These types respond better to the autonomy and self-reliance that passive avoidant leaders provide than that of transformational leaders. Future employee selection, training, and professional development may benefit from testing for leadership and personality types. These processes may then be utilized to improve the safety outcomes of trucking companies and other remote workforces

Comparison of a Numeric and a Descriptive Pain Scale in the Occupational Medicine Setting

Pain is a universal phenomenon. The assessment of a patient’s pain is difficult to objectively obtain because the perception of the pain by the patient is influenced by many subjective perception variables. These variables can inflate or deflate the patient’s self-reported pain level which can adversely affect the medical provider’s ability to accurately create a treatment plan for the patient. This study compared the patient’s response to a self-rating of their pain on a numeric pain scale with the response given by the patient on the Mankoski pain scale. Comparison of the numeric pain scale to the Mankoski pain scale indicated a significant relationship between the two scales, r (218) = .83, p \u3c .05, validating the Mankoski pain scale with acute pain patients. Although not statistically significant, the Mankoski mean score was lower compared to the numeric scores of 3, 4, 5, and 6 and was statistically significantly lower for the numeric scores of 7, 8, and 9

Is life getting better for young women?

[Extract] The real difficulty is that people have no idea of what education truly is. We assess the value of education in the same manner as we assess the value of land or of shares in the stock-exchange market. We want to provide only such education as would enable the student to earn more. We hardly give any thought to the improvement of the character of the educated. The girls, we say, do not have to earn; so why should they be educated? As long as such ideas persist there is no hope of our ever knowing the true value of education. M. K. Gandhi cited in (National Council for Teacher Education, Undated) Introduction. The United Nations Millennium Campaign started in 2000.147 heads of State and 189 member states of the United Nations, through the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), agreed, interalia, to deliver universal education and eliminate gender disparity. Two of the eight MDGs are focused on education, particularly the education of girls. MDG 2 targets universal primary education by 2015 while MDG 3 seeks to eliminate gender disparity in primary education by 2005 and all other levels of education by 2015. The attention on girls follows increasing evidence that educating girls has multiple flow-on effects including improved maternal health and a reduction in infant mortalities, limiting the spread of HIV/AIDS, empowering women and reducing poverty (Archer, 2005). As the saying goes “If you educate a man, you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate the nation” (UnitedNations Economic and Social Council, 28/02/2006))

Essays on macroeconomics: Macroeconomic policy and economic performance.

This thesis discusses the three issues that are important to macroeconomic policymakers. First, I examine the role of inventories over the business cycle. Despite accounting for less that 1% of the level of GDP, inventory changes have made up almost 50% of the post-war volatility of US GDP growth, and yet most models of the business cycle exclude inventories. I develop a dynamic business cycle model that incorporates distribution inventories as well as simple storage inventories. I find that the behaviour of inventories in this model matches the aggregate data well. However, there is little evidence that improved inventory management contributed to the decline in macroeconomic volatility over the last quarter of a century. Second, the optimal design of a monetary policy committee (MPC) is examined as to whether such committees should include a mix of members from outside (external) as well as inside central banks (internal). Using a new theoretical model of voting behaviour on a mixed committee, it is shown that, under certain circumstance and behaviour, the presence of external committee members may be beneficial. However, using the voting record of the Bank of England's MPC, reveals a problem; there is evidence of an agency problem which may eliminate any benefit to the appointment of external members. These results undermine the current intuition as to why such mixed committees should be employed by policymaking institutions. Finally, I investigate the effect of policy uncertainty on household saving using a quasi-natural experiment from Germany in the late 1990s. Around the 1998 election, there was a marked increase in uncertainty; using the fact that civil servants were largely unaffected by this policy uncertainty, we show that households reacted to the increase in uncertainty by saving more and, where possible, by working more via the margin offered by part-time employment

997-90 Right (RV) and Left Ventricular (LV) Geometry and Myocyte Contractile Processes with Dilated Cardiomyopathy (DCM): Disparity Between Myocyte Growth and β-Adrenergic Responsiveness

The progression of DCM has been assumed to be a homogenous process for both the RV and LV. However, this assumption has never been tested. Accordingly, we measured myocyte contractile performance (velocity of shortening, VELSHORT; percent shortening, PERSHORT) at baseline (BASE) and after β-adrenergic receptor stimulation (βAR, 25 nM isoproterenol) of isolated myocytes taken from the RV and LV of 5 pigs with pacing induced DCM (240 bpm, 3 weeks) and 5 control pigs (CON). RV and LV mass/body weight (MASS) and myocyte length and cross-sectional area (CSA) were also determined.CON-RVCON-LVDCM-RVDCM-LVVELSHORT-BASE (μm/s)90±5+50±148±2*,+32±1*VELSHORT-βAR (μm/s)206±8+150±5123±8*111±9*PERSHORT-BASE (%)5.8±0.2+4.6±0.13.1±0.1*,+2.2±0.1*PERSHORT-βAR (%)11.5±0.3+10.2±0.359±0.3*5.2±0.4*Length (μm)150±2+137±1179±2*,+173±2*CSA (μm2)176±4+362±8232±4*,+292±5*Mass (gm/kg)0.8±0.1+2.8±0.11.6±0.1*,+2.9±0.2+p<0.05 vs LV*p<005 vS CONIn controls, RV myocytes were longer and had a smaller CSA, but enhanced contractile performance at baseline and with β-adrenergic stimulation. With DCM, no LV hypertrophy occurred. In contrast, RV chamber and cellular hypertrophy occurred and was associated with a persistent increase of RV myocyte baseline contractile function.SummaryThis study demonstrated, for the first time, that differences in RV and LV myocyte function and β-adrenergic responsiveness exist in normal and DCM states. More importantly, a disparity in RV and LV myocyte growth with DCM occurred. Thus, in this model of DCM, RV and LV growth and changes in contractile performance are not a homogenous process, and suggest that inherent differences exist in the response of RV and LV myocytes to stress

South American streamflow and the extreme phases of the Southern Oscillation

This study investigates the extent of the affect [sic] of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation on South American streamflow. The response of South American precipitation and temperature to the extreme phases of ENSO (El Niño and La Niña events) is well documented; but the response of South American hydrology has been barely studied. Such paucity of research contrasts sharply with that available on the response of North American streamflow to ENSO events

Automated optical identification of a large complete northern hemisphere sample of flat spectrum radio sources with S_6cm > 200 mJy

This paper describes the automated optical APM identification of radio sources from the Jodrell Bank - VLA Astrometric Survey (JVAS), as used for the search for distant radio-loud quasars. The sample has been used to investigate possible relations between optical and radio properties of flat spectrum radio sources. From the 915 sources in the sample, 756 have an optical APM identification at a red (e) and/or blue (o) plate,resulting in an identification fraction of 83% with a completeness and reliability of 98% and 99% respectively. About 20% are optically identified with extended APM objects on the red plates, e.g. galaxies. However the distinction between galaxies and quasars can not be done properly near the magnitude limit of the POSS-I plates. The identification fraction appears to decrease from >90% for sources with a 5 GHz flux density of >1 Jy, to <80% for sources at 0.2 Jy. The identification fraction, in particular that for unresolved quasars, is found to be lower for sources with steeper radio spectra. In agreement with previous studies, we find that the quasars at low radio flux density levels also tend to have fainter optical magnitudes, although there is a large spread. In addition, objects with a steep radio-to-optical spectral index are found to be mainly highly polarised quasars, supporting the idea that in these objects the polarised synchrotron component is more prominent. It is shown that the large spread in radio-to-optical spectral index is possibly caused by source to source variations in the Doppler boosting of the synchrotron component [Abridged].Comment: LaTex, 17 pages, 5 gif figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. High resolution figures can be found at http://www.roe.ac.uk/~ignas

Evolving Therapeutic Strategies for the Classic Philadelphia-Negative Myeloproliferative Neoplasms

AbstractDespite the emergence of JAK inhibitors, there is a need for disease-modifying treatments for Philadelphia-negative myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs). JAK inhibitors ameliorate symptoms and address splenomegaly, but because of the heterogeneous contributors to the disease process, JAK inhibitor monotherapy incompletely addresses the burden of disease. The ever-growing understanding of MPN pathogenesis has provided the rationale for testing novel and targeted therapeutic agents, as monotherapies or in combination, in preclinical and clinical settings. A number of intriguing options have emerged, and it is hoped that further progress will lead to significant changes in the natural history of MPNs