Factors determining career choice

The answers that people provide to these questions: why do people work? why do they decide on the fields which they choose? and what factors affect their decision? are very important to career planning and subsequent satisfaction during the adult years. After all, work affects most persons between the ages of 16 and 61, and the decisions adolescents make about their work, occupations, and careers will significantly affect their future social relationships and leisure-time activities. It is evident then that work is a major part of human experience. Many young people appear to sense that it is through work that they must ultimately validate their adult status and acquire a measure of power and self- determination. Work is so central to most of people's daily existence that their entire outlook is affected by it. In essence, a vocational decision implies a lifestyle decision. For choice of career is not an event which can be located at one point in time. It is a process which stretches back into childhood where basic personality characteristics begin to be formed {Stephens, 1970; Gothard, 1985 ). In making a choice, the individual will seek a career which s/he sees as desirable, as one in which s/he will have the best chance of realising the various needs, hopes and expectations which at the moment of choice s/he believes to be important.peer-reviewe

Asperger's and the Effective Learning Environment

This meta-synthesis of the literature on developing an effective learning environment for children with Asperger Syndrome examines four critical areas that help support academic and social growth and self-advocacy. Early intervention and social skills instruction, while considering the specific needs of the child are foremost and provide the foundation from which all future learning will evolve. Effective learning not only encompasses approaches that are person-centered but also requires adaptations that support transition. For the Asperger child, as he moves into adulthood, transitioning can be especially challenging. As an adult, with ongoing support and interventions, transitions can be opportunities for self-awareness and growth

Discovering habitable Earths, hot Jupiters and other close planets with microlensing

Searches for planets via gravitational lensing have focused on cases in which the projected separation, a, between planet and star is comparable to the Einstein radius, R_E. This paper considers smaller orbital separations and demonstrates that evidence of close-orbit planets can be found in the low-magnification portion of the light curves generated by the central star. We develop a protocol to discover hot Jupiters as well as Neptune-mass and Earth-mass planets in the stellar habitable zone. When planets are not discovered, our method can be used to quantify the probability that the lens star does not have planets within specified ranges of the orbital separation and mass ratio. Nearby close-orbit planets discovered by lensing can be subject to follow-up observations to study the newly-discovered planets or to discover other planets orbiting the same star. Careful study of the low-magnification portions of lensing light curves should produce, in addition to the discoveries of close-orbit planets, definite detections of wide-orbit planets through the discovery of "repeating" lensing events. We show that events exhibiting extremely high magnification can effectively be probed for planets in close, intermediate, and wide distance regimes simply by adding several-time-per-night monitoring in the low-magnification wings, possibly leading to gravitational lensing discoveries of multiple planets occupying a broad range of orbits, from close to wide, in a single planetary system.Comment: 21 pages, 5 figures, submitted to the Astrophysical Journa