A critical review of executive coaching research: a decade of progress and what's to come.

This paper aims to summarise the current state of coaching research and to provide a basis for future research which will provide a frame of reference ensuring that research builds on previous studies and adds to knowledge rather than replicating previous findings in innocence. This approach will prevent wasted effort and resources in organisations and research. The paper is divided into three sections. The first two sections review the state of research over the past hundred years, with a greater focus on the past decade when coaching research has accelerated at warp speed. The paper divides the recent research into categories; the nature of coaching, coach behaviour studies, client behaviour studies, relationship studies and executive coaching impact studies. The third section considers the future direction research may take. It identifies key questions which the authors believe should be the focus of future research and highlights the work undertaken to support coaching researchers and published by the Coaching Foundation

Impact of the innate environment on maintaining memory T-cell numbers in the female genital tract: implications for mucosal vaccine efficacy?

Preventative HIV vaccines aim to elicit long-lived protective immune responses at the site of HIV transmission, capable of responding quickly to HIV challenge, but which remain stable at effector sites of the genital mucosa. The genital mucosa is, however, commonly confronted with innate immune modifiers and inflammatory agents including sexually-transmitted infections, behavioural and hygiene practices. We investigated the impact of mucosal inflammation and homeostatic cytokines on local T-cell phenotype, proliferation, exhaustion and activation

Multi-year salutary effects of windstorm and fire on river cane

Canebrakes are monodominant stands of cane (Arundinaria gigantea [Walter] Muhl.), a bamboo native to and once prominent in the southeastern USA. Canebrakes were important wildlife habitat within the bottomland hardwood forest ecosystem. They have been reduced in areal coverage by an estimated 98% since European settlement due to land conversion and the drastic alteration of disturbance regimes in their floodplain habitat. Ongoing canebrake restoration efforts are hampered by incomplete understanding of the role of natural disturbance in cane ecology. We used a large tornado blow down and multiple prescribed fires to quantify the response of cane to the sequential disturbances of windstorm and fire in the Tensas Watershed of northeastern Louisiana using number and condition of bamboo stems (culms) as response variables. We hypothesized that culms would be more abundant in burned than in unburned stands and that culm populations in burned stands would be younger than in unburned stands. In this study, conducted four years post fire, effects of both windstorm and burning were additive and beneficial. Results indicate that periodic aboveground disturbance has three salutary effects on cane ramet demography: 1) clonal growth following disturbances more than compensates for any culms killed; 2) the cohort of new culms is younger than the culms they replace; and 3) disturbance appears to inoculate some cane stands for several years against local die-offs. Fire is a valuable tool for canebrake management. By periodically resetting cane stands, fires and other disturbances may have played a key role in canebrake formation and persistence over time

Integrating coaching and positive psychology: Concepts and practice

The abstract in included in the text

Infinite barbarians

This paper discusses an infinite regress that looms behind a certain kind of historical explanation. The movement of one barbarian group is often explained by the movement of others, but those movements in turn call for an explanation. While their explanation can again be the movement of yet another group of barbarians, if this sort of explanation does not stop somewhere we are left with an infinite regress of barbarians. While that regress would be vicious, it cannot be accommodated by several general views about what viciousness in infinite regresses amounts to. This example is additional evidence that we should prefer a pluralist approach to infinite regresses

Patterns of care and survival for patients aged under 40 years with bone sarcoma in Britain, 1980–1994

The purpose of the study was to calculate population-based survival rates for osteosarcoma (OS) and Ewing's sarcoma (ES) in Great Britain during 1980–1994, determine proportions of patients treated at specialist centres or entered in national and international clinical trials, and investigate effects of these factors on survival. Data on a population-based series of 1349 patients with OS and 849 with ES were compiled from regional and national cancer registries, UK Children's Cancer Study Group, regional bone tumour registries and clinical trials. Follow-up was through population registers. Survival was analysed by actuarial analysis with log-rank tests and by Cox's proportional hazards analysis. Five-year survival rates during 1980–1984, 1985–1989 and 1990–1994 were 42% (95% CI: 37, 46), 54% (95% CI: 50, 59) and 53% (95% CI: 48, 57), respectively, for OS and 31% (95% CI: 26, 37), 46% (95% CI: 40, 51) and 51% (95% CI: 45, 57) for ES. Proportions of patients treated at a supraregional bone tumour centre or a paediatric oncology centre in the three quinquennia were 36, 56 and 67% for OS and 41, 60 and 69% for ES. In 1983–1992, 48% of OS patients were entered in a national trial; for ES, 27% were entered in 1980–1986 and 54% in 1987–1994. Survival was similar for trial and nontrial patients with OS. For ES, trial patients had consistently higher 5-year survival than nontrial patients: 1980–1986, 42 vs 30%; 1987–1992, 59 vs 42%; 1993–1994, 54 vs 43%. During 1985–1994, patients with OS or ES whose main treatment centre was a nonteaching hospital had lower survival rates. In multivariate analyses of patients diagnosed during 1985–1994 that also included age, sex, primary site, surgical treatment centre, the results relating to main treatment centre for both OS and ES retained significance but the survival advantage of trial entry for ES became nonsignificant. For both OS and ES diagnosed since 1985, patients whose main treatment centre was a nonspecialist hospital had a lower survival rate

FANCD2–FANCI is a clamp stabilized on DNA by monoubiquitination of FANCD2 during DNA repair

Vertebrate DNA crosslink repair excises toxic replication-blocking DNA crosslinks. Numerous factors involved in crosslink repair have been identified, and mutations in their corresponding genes cause Fanconi anemia (FA). A key step in crosslink repair is monoubiquitination of the FANCD2-FANCI heterodimer, which then recruits nucleases to remove the DNA lesion. Here, we use cryo-EM to determine the structures of recombinant chicken FANCD2 and FANCI complexes. FANCD2-FANCI adopts a closed conformation when the FANCD2 subunit is monoubiquitinated, creating a channel that encloses double-stranded DNA (dsDNA). Ubiquitin is positioned at the interface of FANCD2 and FANCI, where it acts as a covalent molecular pin to trap the complex on DNA. In contrast, isolated FANCD2 is a homodimer that is unable to bind DNA, suggestive of an autoinhibitory mechanism that prevents premature activation. Together, our work suggests that FANCD2-FANCI is a clamp that is locked onto DNA by ubiquitin, with distinct interfaces that may recruit other DNA repair factors

Groundcover community assembly in high-diversity pine savannas: seed arrival and fire-generated environmental filtering

Environmental filtering—abiotic and biotic constraints on the demographic performance of individual organisms—is a widespread mechanism of selection in communities. A given individual is “filtered out” (i.e., selectively removed) when environmental conditions or disturbances like fires preclude its survival and reproduction. Although interactions between these filters and dispersal from the regional species pool are thought to determine much about species composition locally, there have been relatively few studies of dispersal × filtering interactions in species-rich communities and fewer still where fire is also a primary selective agent. We experimentally manipulated dispersal and filtering by fire (pre-fire fuel loads and post-fire ash) in species-rich groundcover communities of the longleaf pine ecosystem. We tested four predictions: (1) That species richness would increase with biologically realistic dispersal (seed addition); (2) that the immediate effect of increased fuels in burned communities would be to decrease species richness, whereas the longer-term effects of increased fuels would be to open recruitment opportunities in the groundcover, increase species richness, and increase individual performance (growth) of immigrating species; (3) that adding ash would increase species richness; and (4) that increased dispersal would generate larger increases in species richness in plots with increased fuels compared to plots with decreased fuels. We found that dispersal interacted with complex fire-generated filtering during and after fires. Dispersal increased species richness more in burned communities with increased and decreased fuels compared to burned controls. Moreover, individuals of immigrating species generally grew to larger sizes in burned communities with increased fuels compared to burned controls. In contrast to dispersal and fuels, ash had no effect on species richness directly or in combination with other treatments. We conclude that filtering occurs both during fires and in the post-fire environment and that these influences interact with dispersal such that the consequences are only fully revealed when all are considered in combination. Our experiment highlights the importance of considering the dynamic interplay of dispersal and selection in the assembly of species-rich communities