955 research outputs found
What are the Best Practices to Conduct Sales Training?
[Excerpt] Annually, companies in the U.S. spend over 1459 per salesperson. This is almost 20% more than what companies spend on workers in all other functions. However, the returns on investment from sales training tend to disappoint. Studies demonstrate that participants in traditional curriculum-based training forget more than 80% of the information taught within 90 days. Nonetheless, sales training can still have significant positive impact if appropriate training strategies are employed. Therefore, this report will detail some of the best practices for sales training in the each of the stages of training: pre-training, during training, and post training
What are the Benefits and Challenges of Hiring Disabled Individuals?
[Excerpt] Having a diverse workforce is essential for a successful global economy. A recent survey of national and multinational companies report that executives often identify disability as an area that needs improvement in their diversity and inclusion efforts. There are currently over 18 million working-age people with disabilities in the United States (US), representing a large pool of talent. Unfortunately, the employment rate is only 33% for working-age people with disabilities compared to 76% for those without disabilities. Most people with disabilities would like to work but often remain unemployed or underemployed and they represent one of the largest sources of untapped talent in the labor force. About two-thirds of unemployed persons with a disability are willing to work but cannot find employment. Thus, efforts to improve the inclusion of people with disabilities are needed
What are the Benefits and Challenges of Implementing a Flexible Work Program?
[Excerpt] Flexible work, from compressed work weeks to job sharing to telecommuting to adjustable schedules, has bloomed over the past decade with changes in technology and life demands. 43% of U.S. workers work remotely at least some of the time and 62% of companies have pockets of flexibility in place. Globally, 20% of workers spend at least part of their job working from home. Flexible work arrangement adoption has increased in order to offer employees the ability to adjust their schedules to meet personal needs and to offer employers the ability to meet the needs of the organization. Oftentimes, flexible work options are no longer perceived as an additional benefit but an expected element of a job
Student Perspectives on Reflective Writing, Improvisation, and Cooperative and Peer Learning in a Collegiate Aural Skills Course
Student-centered instructional approaches that directly engage the learner in problem-solving activities and emphasize social interaction in the construction of knowledge are known to be much more effective than traditional teaching methods. While music educators also claim to espouse these views, these strategies have yet to infiltrate the area of aural skills pedagogy, where the mode of instruction often remains limited to traditional repetition and drill. In an effort to update and improve the Ear Training and Sight Singing (ETSS) curriculum at Linfield, reflective writing, improvisation, and cooperative and peer-learning activities were integrated into the course for the 2012-2013 academic year. This study examined the efficacy of these new approaches by comparing students’ experiences, progress, and assessments to those of previous years. Though a comparison of final exam scores did not reveal a statistically significant difference in achievement, results suggest reflective writing was particularly effective for students in increasing self-awareness, organizing and reinforcing learning, increasing retention of course material, and providing opportunities for self-assessment. Data revealed a mixed effectiveness for cooperative and peer-learning activities that is often dependent on a variety of factors including the nature and goals of the activity or assignment and the level of disparity in abilities between partners. Benefits include increased accountability, motivation and practice
Individual Stellar Halos of Massive Galaxies Measured to 100 kpc at using Hyper Suprime-Cam
Massive galaxies display extended light profiles that can reach several
hundreds of kilo parsecs. These stellar halos provide a fossil record of galaxy
assembly histories. Using data that is both wide (~100 square degree) and deep
(i>28.5 mag/arcsec^2 in i-band), we present a systematic study of the stellar
halos of a sample of more than 3000 galaxies at 0.3 < z < 0.5 with . Our study is based on high-quality (0.6 arcsec
seeing) imaging data from the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) Subaru Strategic Program
(SSP), which enables us to individually estimate surface mass density profiles
to 100 kpc without stacking. As in previous work, we find that more massive
galaxies exhibit more extended outer profiles. When this extended light is not
properly accounted for as a result of shallow imaging or inadequate profile
modeling, the derived stellar mass function can be significantly underestimated
at the highest masses. Across our sample, the ellipticity of outer light
profiles increases substantially as we probe larger radii. We show for the
first time that these ellipticity gradients steepen dramatically as a function
of galaxy mass, but we detect no mass-dependence in outer color gradients. Our
results support the two-phase formation scenario for massive galaxies in which
outer envelopes are built up at late times from a series of merging events. We
provide surface mass surface mass density profiles in a convenient tabulated
format to facilitate comparisons with predictions from numerical simulations of
galaxy formation.Comment: Submitted to MNRAS; 23 pages, 8 figures, 2 appendix; Data will be
made available here: http://massivegalaxies.com/ once the paper is publishe
OPA1 disease alleles causing dominant optic atrophy have defects in cardiolipin-stimulated GTP hydrolysis and membrane tubulation
The dynamin-related GTPase OPA1 is mutated in autosomal dominant optic atrophy (DOA) (Kjer type), an inherited neuropathy of the retinal ganglion cells. OPA1 is essential for the fusion of the inner mitochondrial membranes, but its mechanism of action remains poorly understood. Here we show that OPA1 has a low basal rate of GTP hydrolysis that is dramatically enhanced by association with liposomes containing negative phospholipids such as cardiolipin. Lipid association triggers assembly of OPA1 into higher order oligomers. In addition, we find that OPA1 can promote the protrusion of lipid tubules from the surface of cardiolipin-containing liposomes. In such lipid protrusions, OPA1 assemblies are observed on the outside of the lipid tubule surface, a protein-membrane topology similar to that of classical dynamins. The membrane tubulation activity of OPA1 is suppressed by GTPγS. OPA1 disease alleles associated with DOA display selective defects in several activities, including cardiolipin association, GTP hydrolysis and membrane tubulation. These findings indicate that interaction of OPA1 with membranes can stimulate higher order assembly, enhance GTP hydrolysis and lead to membrane deformation into tubules
Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies as Extreme Star-forming Environments I: Mapping Star Formation in HI-Rich UDGs
Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies are both extreme products of galaxy evolution and
extreme environments in which to test our understanding of star formation. In
this work, we contrast the spatially resolved star formation activity of a
sample of 22 HI-selected UDGs and 35 low-mass galaxies from the NASA Sloan
Atlas (NSA) within 120 Mpc. We employ a new joint SED fitting method to compute
star formation rate and stellar mass surface density maps that leverage the
high spatial resolution optical imaging data of the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru
Strategic Program (HSC-SSP) and the UV coverage of GALEX, along with HI radial
profiles estimated from a subset of galaxies that have spatially resolved HI
maps. We find that the UDGs have low star formation efficiencies as a function
of their atomic gas down to scales of 500 pc. We additionally find that the
stellar mass-weighted sizes of our UDG sample are unremarkable when considered
as a function of their HI mass -- their stellar sizes are comparable to the NSA
dwarfs at fixed HI mass. This is a natural result in the picture where UDGs are
forming stars normally, but at low efficiencies. We compare our results to
predictions from contemporary models of galaxy formation, and find in
particular that our observations are difficult to reproduce in models where
UDGs undergo stellar expansion due to vigorous star formation feedback should
bursty star formation be required down to .Comment: Accepted to ApJ, 27 pages, 18 figure
The International Deep Planet Survey II: The frequency of directly imaged giant exoplanets with stellar mass
Radial velocity and transit methods are effective for the study of short
orbital period exoplanets but they hardly probe objects at large separations
for which direct imaging can be used. We carried out the international deep
planet survey of 292 young nearby stars to search for giant exoplanets and
determine their frequency. We developed a pipeline for a uniform processing of
all the data that we have recorded with NIRC2/Keck II, NIRI/Gemini North,
NICI/Gemini South, and NACO/VLT for 14 years. The pipeline first applies
cosmetic corrections and then reduces the speckle intensity to enhance the
contrast in the images. The main result of the international deep planet survey
is the discovery of the HR 8799 exoplanets. We also detected 59 visual multiple
systems including 16 new binary stars and 2 new triple stellar systems, as well
as 2,279 point-like sources. We used Monte Carlo simulations and the Bayesian
theorem to determine that 1.05[+2.80-0.70]% of stars harbor at least one giant
planet between 0.5 and 14M_J and between 20 and 300 AU. This result is obtained
assuming uniform distributions of planet masses and semi-major axes. If we
consider power law distributions as measured for close-in planets instead, the
derived frequency is 2.30[+5.95-1.55]%, recalling the strong impact of
assumptions on Monte Carlo output distributions. We also find no evidence that
the derived frequency depends on the mass of the hosting star, whereas it does
for close-in planets. The international deep planet survey provides a database
of confirmed background sources that may be useful for other exoplanet direct
imaging surveys. It also puts new constraints on the number of stars with at
least one giant planet reducing by a factor of two the frequencies derived by
almost all previous works.Comment: 83 pages, 13 figures, 15 Tables, accepted in A&
Weak Lensing Reveals a Tight Connection Between Dark Matter Halo Mass and the Distribution of Stellar Mass in Massive Galaxies
Using deep images from the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) survey and taking
advantage of its unprecedented weak lensing capabilities, we reveal a
remarkably tight connection between the stellar mass distribution of massive
central galaxies and their host dark matter halo mass. Massive galaxies with
more extended stellar mass distributions tend to live in more massive dark
matter haloes. We explain this connection with a phenomenological model that
assumes, (1) a tight relation between the halo mass and the total stellar
content in the halo, (2) that the fraction of in-situ and ex-situ mass at
kpc depends on halo mass. This model provides an excellent description
of the stellar mass functions (SMF) of total stellar mass () and stellar mass within inner 10 kpc () and also
reproduces the HSC weak lensing signals of massive galaxies with different
stellar mass distributions. The best-fit model shows that halo mass varies
significantly at fixed total stellar mass (as much as 0.4 dex) with a clear
dependence on . Our two-parameter - description provides a more accurate picture of the
galaxy-halo connection at the high-mass end than the simple stellar-halo mass
relation (SHMR) and opens a new window to connect the assembly history of halos
with those of central galaxies. The model also predicts that the ex-situ
component dominates the mass profiles of galaxies at kpc for ). The code used for this paper is available online:
https://github.com/dr-guangtou/asapComment: 22 Pages, 12 Figures, 1 Table; Submitted to MNRAS. The model and
Jupyter notebooks to reproduce the figures are available here:
https://github.com/dr-guangtou/asa
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