Identifying skills needed by office information systems graduates in the changing work environment: perceptions of administrative support occupations workers

This study sought to identify the skills that need to be taught in an associate degree program for office information systems. Specifically, the researcher sought to determine the importance of skills needed by office information systems/ administration graduates with implications for curricular revision. One hundred and fifty-seven members of the International Association of Administrative Professionals in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and East Texas including the Houston, Texas area participated in this study. Findings indicated that the participants perceived 109 (85%) of the job skill items to be important, very important, or extremely important in the performance of their jobs. Only 19 (15%) of the job skill items were perceived to be somewhat important in the performance of their jobs. Almost all of the participants were women and the average number of years in the administrative support occupation field was almost 22 years. Almost three-fourths of the participants had completed some type of post-secondary type of education. The participants reported 70 job titles with the most frequently reported job titles of administrative assistant or executive assistant. Over one-third of the participants were employed in the service industry and one-third reported the scope of the organization as international. Almost one-third of the participants reported the size of the office where they worked as large and over half reported the type of community as large. The participants reported using most frequently Microsoft Office software packages to perform their jobs. To perform their jobs, over half of the participants reported using: copier; calculator; fax machine; computer printer; multi-line telephone systems; personal computer; typewriter; local area network; scanner; and voice mail via telephone. Using the perceived importance of the nine job skill categories’ summated scores and selected personal and professional demographic characteristics, the researcher calculated stepwise multiple on nine separate regression equations. This procedure returned four statistically significant models. However, these models did not explain a large portion of the variance. Recommendations and implications were given for Office Information Systems curriculum associate degree programs. Also, recommendations and implications were provided for future research and studies

The Synthetic Biology Knowledge System

The Synthetic Biology Knowledge System (SBKS) is an instance of the SynBioHub repository that includes text and data information that has been mined from papers published in ACS Synthetic Biology. This paper describes the SBKS curation framework that is being developed to construct the knowledge stored in this repository. The text mining pipeline performs automatic annotation of the articles using natural language processing techniques to identify salient content such as key terms, relationships between terms, and main topics. The data mining pipeline performs automatic annotation of the sequences extracted from the supplemental documents with the genetic parts used in them. Together these two pipelines link genetic parts to papers describing the context in which they are used. Ultimately, SBKS will reduce the time necessary for synthetic biologists to find the information necessary to complete their designs. &nbsp;</p

What Are Dual Process Models? Implications for Cultural Analysis in Sociology

In this paper we introduce the idea of the dual process framework (DPF), an interdisciplinary approach to the study of learning, memory, thinking, and action. Departing from the successful reception of Vaisey (2009), we suggest that intradisciplinary debates in sociology regarding the merits of “dual process” formulations can benefit from a better understanding of the theoretical foundations of these models in cognitive and social psychology. We argue that the key is to distinguish the general DPF from more specific applications to particular domains, which we refer to as dual process models (DPMs). We show how different DPMs can be applied to a variety of analytically distinct issues of interest to cultural sociologists beyond specific issues related to morality, such as culture in learning, culture in memory, culture in thinking, and culture in acting processes. We close by outlining the implications of our argument for relevant work in cultural sociology