Relational Aesthetics and Emotional Relations: Leadership on Board Merchant Marine Ships

Life on board merchant marine ships is very tough, very male, and isolated from much of the rest of the world by language, culture, and usually a large expanse of sea. This article presents data that show that leadership in this environment is full of aesthetic appreciation that is often relational, arising in interaction with others’ appreciation, and also full of strongly felt emotion. Those who exercise leadership on merchant marine ships (captains, chief engineers, first officers) turn out to have strong views on the importance of understanding aesthetics and emotions in discharging their responsibilities. We illuminate these leaders’ aesthetics and emotions about the sea and ships by comparing and contrasting them with those of a professional seascape painter

Appendix

The photographs in this Appendix accompany the article, “Relational Aesthetics and Emotional Relations: Leadership on Board Merchant Marine Ships” by Nana Gharibyan-Kefalloniti and David Sims in this issue of Organization Management Journal

Quantum thermodynamics for a model of an expanding universe

We investigate the thermodynamical properties of quantum fields in curved spacetime. Our approach is to consider quantum fields in curved spacetime as a quantum system undergoing an out-of-equilibrium transformation. The non-equilibrium features are studied by using a formalism which has been developed to derive fluctuation relations and emergent irreversible features beyond the linear response regime. We apply these ideas to an expanding universe scenario, therefore avoiding assumptions on the relation between entropy and quantum matter. We provide a fluctuation theorem which allows us to understand particle production due to the expansion of the universe as an entropic increase. Our results pave the way towards a different understanding of the thermodynamics of relativistic and quantum systems in our universe.Comment: 13 pages, no figures. I. Fuentes previously published as I. Fuentes-Guridi and I. Fuentes-Schulle

Natural Resources and the Economic Growth of West Africa Economies

In this study, we employed the pooled mean group (PMG) regression to examine the effect of natural resources economic rent (coal rent, gas rent, oil rent, forest rent, minerals rent) and foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth in West Africa for the period 1996 to 2017. We found strong evidence of a positive relationship between FDI, total natural resources (TNR), total natural gas (TNG), and economic growth in the long-run. However, the study recorded a negative relationship between mineral resources rent, oil rent and gas rent, and economic growth in the long run. The rent from coal also exhibited neutrality on economic growth. While all the short-run coefficients are not statistically significant, the error correction term (ECT) is significant and a negative value of -0.889, signifying cointegration at a 1% significance level. This also implies that the short-run estimates converge towards the long-run estimates to achieve equilibrium at the speed of 89% per annum. Our findings highlight the significance of FDI and total rent from natural resources in stimulating West African economies' growth in the industrialization drive and general welfare. In contrast, this study also highlights the need for policy direction to redesign and realign ownership in the oil and gas sector from multinational co-operations (MNCs) to the locals and the domestic economy to benefit directly from the prevailing environment

Spatiotemporal modeling of schistosomiasis in Ghana: linking remote sensing data to infectious disease

More than 90% of the worldwide schistosomiasis burden falls on sub-Saharan Africa. Control efforts are often based on infrequent, small-scale health surveys, which are expensive and logistically difficult to conduct. The use of satellite imagery to predictively model infectious disease transmission has great potential for public health applications. The transmission of schistosomiasis, a disease acquired from contact with contaminated surface water, requires specific environmental conditions to sustain freshwater snails. If a connection between schistosomiasis and remotely sensed environmental variables can be established, then cost effective and current disease risk predictions can be made available. Schistosomiasis transmission has unknown seasonality, and the disease is difficult to study due to a long lag between infection and clinical symptoms. To overcome these challenges, we employed a comprehensive 15-year time-series built from remote sensing feeds, which is the longest environmental dataset to be used in the application of remote sensing to schistosomiasis. The following environmental variables will be used in the model: accumulated precipitation, land surface temperature, vegetative growth indices, and climate zones created from a novel climate regionalization technique. This technique, improves upon the conventional Köppen-Geiger method, which has been the primary climate classification system in use the past 100 years. These predictor variables will be regressed against 8 years of national health data in Ghana, the largest health dataset of its kind to be used in this context, and acquired from freely available satellite imagery data. A benefit of remote sensing processing is that it only requires training and time in terms of resources. The results of a fixed effects model can be used to develop a decision support framework to design treatment schemes and direct scarce resources to areas with the highest risk of infection. This framework can be applied to diseases sensitive to climate or to locations where remote sensing would be better suited than health surveys.Published versio

Evaluating the Patient Experience in Outpatient Detoxification: Implications for Improvement of the Early Stages of Alcohol and/or Opioid Use Disorder and Recovery Treatment Processs

A Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF NURSING PRACTICE in Nursing ScienceBackground and Literature Review: Anchorage is among the cities besieged by the alcohol and opioid crisis. The city has numerous outpatient MAT programs and substance treatment settings that can provide outpatient detoxification programs. Although the literature supports outpatient detoxification as feasible, safe, and affordable, it does not provide a specific model of outpatient detoxification. The Alaska Treatment Center (ATC) offers outpatient detoxification based on a biopsychosocial model of detoxification. Since the ATC outpatient detoxification seeks to expand treatment through this model, it is necessary to evaluate the patients’ experiences to improve clinical practice and substance treatment. Purpose: This project aimed to evaluate patient experiences in outpatient detoxification at ATC and identify promising strategies for improvement of the model to formulate strategic practice advancement using empirical data from participants. Methods: The project was quasi-experimental in design and informed by Lewin’s three stage change model. Descriptive statistics of demographic and survey responses were presented using frequencies and percentages for categorical and ordinal variables. A 45-item survey collapsed into three areas: the initial encounter, relationship during treatment, and overall impression. A spearman’s rank correlation was conducted to test the internal consistency and construct validity of the instrument. Statistical significance was set at p ≤ .05. All analyses were conducted using SPSS Version 26. Implementation Plan/Procedure: The Generic Short Patient Experiences Questionnaire (GSPEQ) was modified and approved for use in this project by the University of Alaska Anchorage Institutional Review Board. The survey instrument was administered to 42 participants who received outpatient detoxification from ATC. The findings revealed successful completion rate of detoxification, with a significant correlation between before detoxification, rho = 0.1414, p = .007, and after detoxification, rho = -0.439, p = .769. Conclusion: The findings led to a modification of the ATC biopsychosocial model to encompass theoretical, contextual, conceptual, systematical, empirical, and implementational analysis. Consequently, flow charts, modified decision trees, and theory of change were integrated into the ATC policies and the electronic medical record. The project revealed that detoxification is a vital step in substance treatment and may be successfully provided in outpatient treatment settings using the right model of treatment. Organizational changes such as hiring additional staff and sharing the model with other MAT programs are still in progress

On Some Compartmental Models for Ebola Disease

In this paper, we consider an epidemic model of Ebola disease which is deadly in its transmission. Local stability analysis of the model equilibria was investigated. We computed the basic reproduction number 〖 R〗_0 using the next generation method. The threshold parameter R_0 was found to be dependent on several hosts of model parameters in determining the stability of an invading epidemic into the population. We have numerically described the model trajectories using Matlab. KEYWORDS: Basic Reproduction number, Ebola virus, Next-generation matrix, Local stability analysis