Changes in academic work and the chair regime: the case of German business administration academics

Today universities around the world are becoming subject to audits and evaluations that not only open them to outside scrutiny, but also force them to compete with each other for students, staff and funding. This development is supposed to lead to radical changes to academic work in business schools. Whereas there is an intensive debate about this issue in the UK, much less is known about changes in higher education in other European countries. This paper will show through the example of German business administration academics that similar pressures might not lead to similar outcomes. In the German system, hierarchy will remain more important than the market for academic work. Although role conflicts seem to increase for academics at all hierarchical levels, the traditional regime is likely to resist any far-reaching changes

An Examination of an Optimism Training intervention on Optimism Levels of NCAA Division I Athletes: A Single Subject Design

Optimism has been shown to provide many benefits, such as better health, increased satisfaction, confidence, motivation, and higher athletic performance. Research has also suggested the ability to increase the frequency of experiencing those benefits through the use of certain cognitive behavior therapy techniques. While the research shows the ability to increase optimism in a random sample of individuals, there is a lack of research on increasing optimism in athletes. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of an optimism training intervention on state optimism levels of NCAA Division 1 athletes. It was hypothesized the intervention will increase optimism levels in participants. Results displayed an increase in optimism scores during the intervention phase for all participants. After the intervention, two participants dropped in optimism levels while the other two stayed relatively the same. These results suggest optimism training may increase optimism levels. Further research examining varying sports, length of intervention, and timing the intervention closer to in-season is suggested

Foreword: The Nature of Discretion

Power consumption has become a critical issue in large scale clusters. Existing solutions for addressing the servers’ energy consumption suggest “shrinking” the set of active machines, at least until the more power-proport-ional hardware devices become available. This paper demonstrates that leveraging the sleeping state, however, may lead to unacceptably poor performance and low data availability if the distributed services are not aware of the power management’s actions. Therefore, we present an architecture for cluster services in which the deployed services overcome this problem by actively participating in any action taken by the power management. We propose, implement, and evaluate modifications for the Hadoop Distributed File System and the MapReduce clone that make them capable of operating efficiently under limited power budgets.QC 20140707</p