Applying work motivation theories to articulate the challenges of providing effective doctoral supervision

Universities in the United Kingdom face numerous demands regarding provision of quality research education to increasing numbers of doctoral students. One challenge is the recruitment of suitably qualified, skilled academics to take on their supervision and subsequently provide a high quality student experience. Understanding what motivates supervisors is central to facing this challenge. However, little theory underpins the supervision processes and even less pertain specifically to the issues of supervisor motivation. The paper addresses this short fall by exploring and applying work motivation theories to the higher education postgraduate context. It considers goal setting and social cognitive theory, as used in the wider area of work social-psychology, to lay a new theoretical approach that enables motivation to supervise to be better articulated and assessed. The content of the paper resides within the theme “Theoretical frameworks of learning and teaching in higher education. In taking this novel approach to understanding supervision in higher education, the paper will inform academic developers facing the current challenges in strategic decision making that relate to research education and student supervision. It will interest to those participants involved in academic supervisor training in terms of programme content and it has relevance for post graduate supervisors, at all levels, in terms of their own performance and career objectives. Finally, it has an application for policy makers as the work fits into the new and emerging political landscape surrounding doctoral/research education in the UK and internationally

Caught in the Middle? Occupancy in Multiple Roles and Help to Parents in a National Probability Sample of Canadian Adults

This paper considers for a Canadian national probability sample of middle-aged women and men the question of how typical is the experience of being "caught in the middle" between being the adult child of elderly parents and other roles. Three roles are examined: adult child, employed worker, and parent (and a refinement of the parent role, being a parent of a co-resident child). Occupancy in multiple roles is examined, followed by an investigation of the extent to which adults in various role combinations actually assist older parents and whether those who provide frequent help are also those "sandwiched" by competing ommitments. The majority of middle-aged children do not provide frequent help to parents. Notably, the highest proportion of daughters who assist elderly parents are those in their fifties whose children are no longer co-resident. For both sons and daughters, being "caught in the middle" is far from a typical experience in this cross-sectional analysis.multiple roles

The Effect of Speaking Rate on Audio and Visual Speech

The speed that an utterance is spoken affects both the duration of the speech and the position of the articulators. Consequently, the sounds that are produced are modified, as are the position and appearance of the lips, teeth, tongue and other visible articulators. We describe an experiment designed to measure the effect of variable speaking rate on audio and visual speech by comparing sequences of phonemes and dynamic visemes appearing in the same sentences spoken at different speeds. We find that both audio and visual speech production are affected by varying the rate of speech, however, the effect is significantly more prominent in visual speech

A Mouth Full of Words: Visually Consistent Acoustic Redubbing

This paper introduces a method for automatic redubbing of video that exploits the many-to-many mapping of phoneme sequences to lip movements modelled as dynamic visemes [1]. For a given utterance, the corresponding dynamic viseme sequence is sampled to construct a graph of possible phoneme sequences that synchronize with the video. When composed with a pronunciation dictionary and language model, this produces a vast number of word sequences that are in sync with the original video, literally putting plausible words into the mouth of the speaker. We demonstrate that traditional, one-to-many, static visemes lack flexibility for this application as they produce significantly fewer word sequences. This work explores the natural ambiguity in visual speech and offers insight for automatic speech recognition and the importance of language modeling

Mint Condition

What is collected? What is discarded? When something is described as “mint condition,” it means it has virtually no imperfections. This term is given to pre-owned objects, denoting their value. Collected and discarded materials absorb something from us, something distinctly human. I think about all of the stuffed animals I’ve owned, how I embedded personality in and formed a relation to those objects. The stuff we collect becomes elevated and reinscribed in that way. This is true for the materials we discard as well. Each plastic takeout container holds nourishment, however temporary it may be. The materials in my work are a combination of secondhand beanie babies, discarded bits and pieces of plastic, paper and styrofoam, as well as objects that invite a childlike spirit of arts and crafts such as beads, pipe cleaners, cotton balls and string. This element speaks to my personal embeddedness in the work. To this degree the work is an opportunity to gain insight into my own collection habits that fill corners in both my home and memory. Allowing the objects one more incarnation. This project was born out of a drive to take childhood objects and bring them to a larger scale- to give them more importance and value, as well as an aim to depict the process of growing up, a process which may be deemed as a loss of innocence or value. The works in Mint Condition are anything but pristine. They are messy, at times grotesque with an element of sickly sweetness. The beanie babies themselves, which are often kept in mint condition by collectors, have been doused in glue, tied up and reconfigured forcing their significance to come from elsewhere

The development and validation of a multidimensional measure of male body dissatisfaction and its preliminary use in exploring the relationship between body dissatisfaction and exercise

Historically, research has focused predominately on female experience of body dissatisfaction (BD). More recently there has been an increased focus upon BD in men. The current literature review indicates that research in BD in men is its infancy compared to BD in females and the review highlights the differences between the experience of BD in men and women and the difficulties in applying evidence that has been found in female samples to males. In line with this, tools used to assess females may not be appropriate to assess males. It is therefore important to develop an instrument that accurately assesses BD in males to identify those who may be at risk. The literature review also pays attention to the coping strategies that men may engage in with a particular focus on exercise and its potential role as both a protective and risk factor.The purpose of the empirical paper was to explore the structure of a new measure: The Male Body Dissatisfaction Inventory (M-BoDI). A Principal Components Analysis revealed a four-component structure. The study provided evidence of concurrent validity for the M-BoDI and good internal reliability and the scores on the M-BoDI were stable over a 4-week period. A significant relationship was found between negative reasons for exercising and BD as measured by the M-BoDI, and negative reasons for exercising were also linked to core excessive exercise features. Implications of the current findings and ideas for further research are discussed

Age-Gapped and Age-Condensed Lineages: Patterns of Intergenerational Age Structure among Canadian Families

This paper examines intergenerational connections within Canadian families. Its focus is on intergenerational age structure, the interval or 'gap' in years that separates one generation from the next. Intergenerational age structure is measured in terms of the age of a mother at the birth of her first child. Using data from the 1995 General Social Survey of Canada, the study examines the socio-demographic characteristics of women (n=404) in three- and four-generation families (lineages) that are age-condensed (small age distances between generations that are the result of early fertility) and those that are age- gapped (with large age distances between generations that are the result of late fertility patterns). Across two generations of women, there is a striking similarity in the distributions of age at first birth with just under one-third of the sample having early fertility, just over one-half falling into a normative or "on-time" category, and one-seventh having delayed fertility. However, when matched pairs of mothers and daughters are compared across generations, age-condensed and age-gapped lineage patterns show considerable variability. Although just under one-half of mother-daughter dyads show lineage consistency in family age structure across three generations (most typically in age-condensed/age-condensed or normative/normative age structures), low percentages of women whose family of origin was age-gapped repeat that age structure pattern in their own families of procreation. Socio-demographic factors such as mother's and daughter's age, family size, age at first marriage, and level of education are associated with lineage continuity and discontinuity in family age structure.intergenerational age structure; GSS

Crafting Qualitative Research Articles on Marriages and Families

This paper aims to assist those who do qualitative research in the field of marriage and family to reduce the number of rejections received in response to article submissions. Recurring shortcomings identified by reviewers and suggestions made to authors about revising papers are organized using headings traditionally used in a research article—introduction and literature review, method, results, and discussion. Considerations stemming from the fact that data on marriages and families are produced largely through interviews also are addressed

Review of Friendships Between Women: A Critical Review

Reviews the book Friendships Between Women: A Critical Review, by Pat O\u27Connor

Review of Disciplining Feminism: from Social Activism to Academic Discourse, by E. Messer-Davidow

Review of Disciplining Feminism: from Social Activism to Academic Discourse, by E. Messer-Davido