Towards a greater understanding of resilience within the professional practice of a coach

Career resilience is a concept that since the 1990’s has been associated within career coaching practice, as a proactive set of behaviours which provide protection against the vicissitudes of the employment market. Revisiting the concept at a time of economic downturn, the author critiques the limitations of the protection model of resilience when working with individuals who have lost access to their own resilience as a result of career setback and disappointment. It also acknowledged that the recent attention given to developing resilience capacity in order to prevent loss of resilience has ignored the issue of recovery from loss of resilience. A comparative case study of 2 executives, who recognised their own loss of resilience, was conducted through narrative methodology. Data was collected through a combination of repeated written narratives and 10 hours of individual coaching. The materials generated were thematically analysed. The results of that analysis are potential models relating to the process of change in the construction of a new narrative, the role of the coach within that process, and the systemic relationship between the two. The value of written narrative and the limitations of the use of narrative are explored, along with consideration of the value to the study of the writings of the researcher in exploring her own resilience

New approaches to aromatic fluorinations

Imperial Users onl

Modulation of inherent dynamical tendencies of the bisabolyl cation via preorganization in epi-isozizaene synthase.

The relative importance of preorganization, selective transition state stabilization and inherent reactivity are assessed through quantum chemical and docking calculations for a sesquiterpene synthase (epi-isozizaene synthase, EIZS). Inherent reactivity of the bisabolyl cation, both static and dynamic, appears to determine the pathway to product, although preorganization and selective binding of the final transition state structure in the multi-step carbocation cascade that forms epi-isozizaene appear to play important roles

k-best: A new method for real-time decision making

Many real-world problems, such as air-traffic control and factory scheduling, require that a sequence of decisions be made in real time. The real-time constraint means that we typically do not have sufficient time to find a complete solution to the problem using traditional methods before we must commit to a decision. We propose an incremental search approach to making real-time, sequential decisions, and then present a new decision method called k-best, which is both an extension of an existing realtime decision method (MINIMIN) and an approximation to a decision-theoretic approach to the real-time decision problem. We next provide an analytical bound on the worst-case expected error when k-best is used instead of the optimal decision method. The averagecase performance of k-best is then compared to MINIMIN on a set of randomly generated problems. Our results show that k-best is an improvement over MINIMIN, although MIN IMIN performs quite well. Given that MIN IMIN is very efficient and easy to implement, we conclude that it should be the algorithm of choice for many real-time decision problems.

The uncontrolled cooking test : measuring three-stone fire performance in northern Mozambique

The assessment of cooking system performance in developing countries is a continued area of interest, with laboratory testing methods often being unrepresentative of real world use, and field based methods tending to be resource intensive with high levels of variability. This paper presents the Uncontrolled Cook Test (UCT), a relatively low cost field testing protocol that assesses the task-based performance of the system when cooking any meal and operated as per local conditions and practice. A total of 29 UCTs were conducted in households in a study village in rural northern Mozambique, all on wood-burning three stone fires. The UCT proved a capable method for the assessment of cooking system performance and, critically, returned a data set with less variation than is typically reported by existing field test methods, so offering the potential to use fewer resources to detect a statistically significant difference between baseline and ‘improved’ stove results

Response to Intervention and the Impact on Eligibility for Special Education Services in Texas

Response to Intervention (RTI) trends and special education referrals were examined and compared with the self-reported data of special education directors and evaluation staff to determine the overall impact of RTI on special education referrals. A descriptive nonexperimental design study using existing data and survey methods was used. Findings from archival data demonstrated that during the period ranging from 2007 to 2011, trends at the state level, across regional services centers, and in one independent school district showed an increase in the number of students who were referred and found eligible for special education services. However, there was an average decrease in the number of students receiving special education services at the regional and state levels and an increase according to one district level. The trends that evolved suggest a possible relationship between the RTI process and increasingly accurate referrals for special education services. Findings from the survey administered at the Education Service Center (ESC) indicated the perceptions of special education directors and evaluation staff did not mirror the findings of the archival data. However, data gathered from the survey administered at the Independent School District (ISD) indicated the perceptions of the special education director and evaluation staff did mirror the findings of actual archival data

Patient safety in dentistry: development of a candidate 'never event' list for primary care

Introduction The 'never event' concept is often used in secondary care and refers to an agreed list of patient safety incidents that 'should not happen if the necessary preventative measures are in place'. Such an intervention may raise awareness of patient safety issues and inform team learning and system improvements in primary care dentistry. Objective To identify and develop a candidate never event list for primary care dentistry. Methods A literature review, eight workshops with dental practitioners and a modified Delphi with 'expert' groups were used to identify and agree candidate never events. Results Two-hundred and fifty dental practitioners suggested 507 never events, reduced to 27 distinct possibilities grouped across seven themes. Most frequently occurring themes were: 'checking medical history and prescribing' (119, 23.5%) and 'infection control and decontamination' (71, 14%). 'Experts' endorsed nine candidate never event statements with one graded as 'extreme risk' (failure to check past medical history) and four as 'high risk' (for example, extracting wrong tooth). Conclusion Consensus on a preliminary list of never events was developed. This is the first known attempt to develop this approach and an important step in determining its value to patient safety. Further work is necessary to develop the utility of this method