How do you Create a Culture Where All Employees Take Accountability for Decision Making?

“Organizational scholars and practitioners alike have argued that if organizations are to flourish in the volatile global environment and meet the concomitant challenges of geographic dispersion, electronic collaboration, and cultural diversity, they must become more knowledge intensive, decentralized, participative, adaptive, flexible, efficient and responsive to rapid change.“ Based on research, I have found that this can be achieved through methods of increasing employee participation and empowering more employees to make decisions

An annotated bibliography of aids for improving understanding of Julius Caesar

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Parliament bounces back – how Select Committees have become a power in the land

Much reformist discussion of the House of Commons views it as an institution in permanent decline, operating in a museum-building with stuffy and out-of-date processes that MPs stubbornly refuse to change. But Patrick Dunleavy and Dominic Muir show that the reforms pushed through in 2009-10 by Tony Wright have already made a dramatic difference. The media visibility of the Commons’ Select Committees has grown substantially, giving them unprecedented national (even global) attention

The expression of tumour suppressors and proto-oncogenes in tissues susceptible to their hereditary cancers.

BackgroundStudies of familial cancers have found that only a small subset of tissues are affected by inherited mutations in a given tumour suppressor gene (TSG) or proto-oncogene (POG), even though the mutation is present in all tissues. Previous tests have shown that tissue specificity is not due to the presence vs absence of gene expression, as TSGs and POGs are expressed in nearly every type of normal human tissue. Using published microarray expression data we tested the related hypothesis that tissue-specific expression of a TSG or POG is highest in tissue where it is of oncogenic importance.MethodsWe tested this hypothesis by examining whether individual TSGs and POGs had higher expression in the normal (noncancerous) tissues where they are implicated in familial cancers relative to those tissues where they are not. We examined data for 15 TSGs and 8 POGs implicated in familial cancer across 12 human tissue types.ResultsWe found a significant difference between expression levels in susceptible vs nonsusceptible tissues. It was found that 9 (60%, P<0.001) of the TSGs and 5 (63%, P<0.001) of the POGs had their highest expression level in the tissue type susceptible to their oncogenic effect.ConclusionsThis highly significant association supports the hypothesis that mutation of a specific TSG or POG is likely to be most oncogenic in the tissue where the gene has its highest level of expression. This suggests that high expression in normal tissues is a potential marker for linking cancer-related genes with their susceptible tissues

Podcasting, pupils and pre-service-teachers

This Action Research conforms to Cohen's definition (2000) as "small scale intervention in the functioning of the real world and a close examination of the effects of such an intervention." It is a pilot study that uses a small, but representative group of students with a view to establishing generalisations about the wider applicability of the methods explored. (Burns, 2000, pp. 460-461) The authors examine the use of podcasting - a popular contemporary method of delivering audio content through computers and portable media players. Many rationales for their use in education can be advanced, for example Freedman (2006) lists sixteen reasons including the potential for students to access the podcasts at their own convenience. See also Maag (2006) and Kollar (2006). The study group included six undergraduate, pre-service science teachers who were completing a BSc (Honours) in Bioscience with Teaching. They had previously undertaken course assessments which incorporated presentations to peers and tutors. The pre-service science teachers had already completed block and serial school placements and were considered as being skilled in planning and delivering short presentations as part of their classroom practice. Their presentations had invariably been supported with well constructed and illustrated PowerPoint presentations. The Benchmark Standards for Initial Teacher Education (ITE) (General Teaching Council for Scotland & Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, 2006) relate to classroom to whole school standards for ITE in Scotland. They make specific reference to the significance and the expectations for Information and Communication Technology (ICT). ICT is viewed (paragraph 3.1) as a "Core professional interest" and student teachers should be "undertaking a range of approaches to teaching to facilitate the learning of pupils, including the appropriate use of information and communications technology". Also, ICT provides the potential "to contribute to a process of change". Boud (2000) was critical of assessment practices in higher education institutions and suggested "The purposes of assessment should be extended to include the preparation of students for sustainable assessment". Draper and Maguire (2006) explored the use of podcasts in campus based teaching with first year undergraduates in the Re-engineering Assessment Practices (REAP) project. These considerations helped motivate the authors to explore podcasts as a means of promoting sustainable assessment with fourth year undergraduates and consider their potential within professional graduate courses. The research explored the following questions: - Did the process of preparing podcasts extend their professional learning? - Can pre-service teachers deliver a well planned, coherent and well organised presentation to demonstrate their understanding of principles of learning and teaching? - Can pre-service teachers prepare a podcast to describe their own action research findings? Pre-service science teachers found the process challenging and rewarding. Pre-service teachers prepared podcast presentations that described their own action research findings. Pre-service teachers delivered well planned, coherent and well organised presentations to demonstrate their understanding of principles of learning and teaching. The process of preparing podcasts extended their professional learning in a variety of ways - base level technical competence in managing the software; pedagogically in identifying and supporting a teaching and learning resource; and professionally in relation to the Benchmark Standards for ITE. The approach is transferable to further study with a larger group of PGDE pre-service teachers

Neuroimaging as a selection tool and endpoint in preclinical and clinical trials

Standard imaging in acute stroke enables the exclusion of non-stroke structural CNS lesions and cerebral haemorrhage from clinical and pre-clinical ischaemic stroke trials. In this review, the potential benefit of imaging (e.g., angiography and penumbral imaging) as a translational tool for trial recruitment and the use of imaging endpoints are discussed for both clinical and pre-clinical stroke research. The addition of advanced imaging to identify a “responder” population leads to reduced sample size for any given effect size in phase 2 trials and is a potentially cost-efficient means of testing interventions. In pre-clinical studies, technical failures (failed or incomplete vessel occlusion, cerebral haemorrhage) can be excluded early and continuous multimodal imaging of the animal from stroke onset is feasible. Pre- and post-intervention repeat scans provide real time assessment of the intervention over the first 4–6 h. Negative aspects of advanced imaging in animal studies include increased time under general anaesthesia, and, as in clinical studies, a delay in starting the intervention. In clinical phase 3 trial designs, the negative aspects of advanced imaging in patient selection include higher exclusion rates, slower recruitment, overestimated effect size and longer acquisition times. Imaging may identify biological effects with smaller sample size and at earlier time points, compared to standard clinical assessments, and can be adjusted for baseline parameters. Mechanistic insights can be obtained. Pre-clinically, multimodal imaging can non-invasively generate data on a range of parameters, allowing the animal to be recovered for subsequent behavioural testing and/or the brain taken for further molecular or histological analysis