Exploring the concept of learning agility : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Studies in Human Resource Management at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand

Continuous learning and employee adaptation have become increasingly important within modern organisational environments categorised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. In turn, this has resulted in a growing body of literature supporting a construct known as learning agility. This study sought to determine the underlying psychological variables that support individual learning agility. In doing so, cognitive ability, personality, and emotional intelligence assessments distributed by OPRA Psychology Group were administered to a random sample of Scenic Hotel Group employees to obtain quantifiable data. Alongside this, a validated learning agility questionnaire was administered to participants and their managers to obtain a measure of each employee’s learning agility. Participants’ learning agility scores were then correlated with their personality, cognitive ability, and emotional intelligence assessment results. Results of this study indicate that learning agility is significantly positively correlated with overall cognitive ability. Furthermore, learning agility shows a significantly positive relationship with personality factors associated with openness to experience, extraversion, and the neuroticism sub-trait, tense-driven. As an outcome, this has provided for a tentative model of learning agility comprising of: 1. Cognitive ability 2. Learning mindset and behaviour 3. Contribution to the social learning environment This research adds to the current body of literature available into a construct known as a key determinant of employee performance and potential (Eichinger & Lombardo, 2000; McCauley, 2001). Furthermore, it provides the foundations for the development of a derived measure of learning agility that can be determined using existing psychometric assessments

Electrochemical capacitors for energy management

Rapid storage and efficient delivery of electrical energy in heavy-duty applications are being enabled by electrochemical capacitors

A generalized correlation of experimental flat-plate collector performance

A generalized collector performance correlation was derived and shown by experimental verification to be of the proper form to account for the majority of the variable conditions encountered both in outdoor and in indoor collector tests. This correlation permits a determination of collector parameters which are essentially nonvarying under conditions which do vary randomly (outdoors) or conditions which vary in a controlled manner (indoors - simulator). It was shown that correlation of the experimental performance of collectors allows the following: (1) comparisons of different collector designs; (2) collector performance prediction under conditions that differ from the conditions of the test program; and (3) monitoring performance degradation effects

Agrarian capitalism in central Mexico: from hacienda to rancho in the state of Queretaro, 1845-1900

This thesis takes issue with two commonly held assumptions of - Mexican historiography. One, that the cereal-producing hacienda (or 'great estate') of nineteenth-century Central Mexico was backward and serai-feudal. And two, commensurate with the first, that the emergence of an agrarian bourgeoisie in Mexico was delayed until these archaic edifices had been swept away by the Revolution of 1910 and the subsequent agrarian reform of the 1920s and 1930s.Tlie study focuses oh the state of Queretaro and draws on detailed archival material for five haciendas in the area for the period from the 1840s: San Juanico, Juriquilla, San Jose el Alto, Chichimequillas, and Agua Azul. Close analysis is made of the economic structure and profitability of these estates by way of an examination of each of their major products - maize, wheat, chili, and milk. Particular attention is paid to the popular accusation of hacienda inefficiency, and production costs are assessed in the light of comparative material from Europe and U.S.A. In this way the study documents a general trend during the latter half of the nineteenth century towards the establishment of bourgeois production and economic success on the hacienda. These beginnings of agrarian capitalism in Queretaro were then cut short by the outbreak of the Revolution and the subsequent period of uncertainty, and agrarian reform in the 1920s. and 1930s. The second part of the thesis examines the -impact of these events and goes on to chart the revival of the agrarian bourgeoisie in the area over the years from the i9%0s

An investigation of the performance portability of OpenCL

This paper reports on the development of an MPI/OpenCL implementation of LU, an application-level benchmark from the NAS Parallel Benchmark Suite. An account of the design decisions addressed during the development of this code is presented, demonstrating the importance of memory arrangement and work-item/work-group distribution strategies when applications are deployed on different device types. The resulting platform-agnostic, single source application is benchmarked on a number of different architectures, and is shown to be 1.3–1.5× slower than native FORTRAN 77 or CUDA implementations on a single node and 1.3–3.1× slower on multiple nodes. We also explore the potential performance gains of OpenCL’s device fissioning capability, demonstrating up to a 3× speed-up over our original OpenCL implementation

Charge storage mechanism in nanoporous carbons and its consequence for electrical double layer capacitors

Electrochemical capacitors, also known as supercapacitors, are energy storage devices that fill the gap between batteries and dielectric capacitors. Thanks to their unique features, they have a key role to play in energy storage and harvesting, acting as a complement to or even a replacement of batteries which has already been achieved in various applications. One of the challenges in the supercapacitor area is to increase their energy density. Some recent discoveries regarding ion adsorption in microporous carbon exhibiting pores in the nanometre range can help in designing the next generation of high-energy-density supercapacitors

The construction and evaluation of a reading vocabulary test for the middle grades

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit