Mediating Will Disputes: A Proposal to Add a Discretionary Mediation Clause to the Uniform Probate Code

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

Micropolitics and the Principalship: A Qualitative Examination of How Principals Develop This Critical Attribute of School Leadership

Schools, like most contemporary organizations, are complex places, and there is an extensive body of evidence that outlines the skills that school leaders must possess to effectively operate schools. Effective school leadership is essential, and not only for the safe and orderly operations of school. Recent evidence indicates that a positive relationship exists between principal effectiveness and student achievement. The complexity of schools is due in part to the fact that schools are immersed in politics. This case sought to explore how principals acquire and develop the micropolitical skills required for their position from the onset of the principalship

Disruptive behavior and miscommunication in health care settings

The idea of disruptive behavior within healthcare organizations correlates with the number of medication errors due to miscommunication. Most people would agree that miscommunication and disruptive behavior are highly related in any setting, but are extremely important to detect and diagnose in health care settings because of the direct results these behaviors may have on patient care and satisfaction. Understanding and being able to determine the problems between staff members in clinical settings is essential in deciding on recommendations for solving this problem

Micropolitics and the Principalship: A Qualitative Examination of How Principals Develop This Critical Attribute of School Leadership

Schools, like most contemporary organizations, are complex places, and there is an extensive body of evidence that outlines the skills that school leaders must possess to effectively operate schools. Effective school leadership is essential, and not only for the safe and orderly operations of school. Recent evidence indicates that a positive relationship exists between principal effectiveness and student achievement. The complexity of schools is due in part to the fact that schools are immersed in politics. This case sought to explore how principals acquire and develop the micropolitical skills required for their position from the onset of the principalship

THE INTERACTIVE EFFECTS OF MICROTOPOGRAPHY AND HYDROLOGY ON GROUND LAYER VEGETATION AND SOIL GAS FLUX RESPONSES TO A SIMULATED EMERALD ASH BORER INFESTATION IN BLACK ASH WETLANDS

Black ash (Fraxinus nigra Marshall) wetlands are at risk of significant ecological and functional changes due to the invasive emerald ash borer (EAB) (Agrilus planipennis Fairmaire (Coleoptera: Buprestidae)), which kills trees in the Fraxinus (ash) genus. Simulated EAB infestations consisting of girdle treatments and ash cut treatments have been implemented in black ash wetlands to study the impacts of black ash canopy dieoff in these systems. Initial findings include ground layer vegetation shifts and impacts to carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) release from soils, but these factors and their interactions with microtopography in these systems are not well understood. The objectives of this study were to explore how vegetation and greenhouse gas fluxes (GHGs) are currently responding to simulated EAB treatments in the Ottawa National Forest in the Great Lakes Region of North America six years after initial treatment implementation, and to determine how microtopography affects them as well. Tree seedling counts and diversity were not found to be affected by treatments alone. Microtopography, however, had a larger impact and showed more seedlings and a higher diversity of seedlings growing on hummocks. Seedlings over one year of age were also found in greater numbers and with more diversity on top of hummocks. Herbaceous species have continued their trend of increased cover in treated sites, with higher cover of obligate wetland species and graminoids in treated sites as well. Increased herbaceous cover was found on top of hummocks rather than in hollows. These findings suggest that herbaceous cover is influenced by both treatments and microtopography, while tree regeneration is more influenced by microtopography. The implications of the lack of response between treatments for seedlings is that the increase in water levels at our wetland sites may be buffered by microtopography and our sites could continue to stay forested following an EAB infestation. CO2 and CH4 fluxes showed different responses to treatment and microtopography. CO2 flux was highest in control sites and on top of hummocks, while CH4 was not found to be different between treatments or microtopography. The postulated reasons for these findings are depth to water table and root respiration. For CO2, the lower water levels allowed for more soil to be aerated and decomposed, and there is more root respiration in control sites because of a higher volume of living trees. For CH4, the low water levels created an environment where little CH4 was produced at all. When landscape-scale estimates of GHG fluxes were created using weighted fluxes from hummocks and hollows, CO2 fluxes were overestimated and CH4 fluxed were underestimated when the elevation-based flux differences due to microtopography were not factored in. These findings suggest that microtopography should be included when scaling up gas flux measurements to the landscape scale in order to get the most accurate estimates

The motivational quality of nutrition-related websites for children

Included among the issues of using computer technology with children are the concerns with website content and gender inequality. Many tools have been developed to evaluate the content of websites, however even a website validated with accurate content can create an unpleasant experience for the user if it does not possess qualities that motivate the user to engage in it. Also, based on previous data that demonstrates variations between males and females with various aspects of computer usage, gender differences in ratings of websites for their motivational quality could potentially exist.Thus, the purpose of this study was three-fold: 1) to determine the level of utility and interest of nutrition-related websites for children; 2) to evaluate gender differences with the way that the motivational qualities of websites are rated; and 3) to determine those factors that are associated with utility and interest of nutrition-related websites forchildren.Using the WebMAC Junior- 2000 evaluation tool, 38 fourth- and fifth-grade students in a local magnet school for technology rated the motivational quality of one science-related website that was rated awesome from previous use with the WebMACtool and ten nutrition-related websites. First, the students interacted with the website andthen, based on a Likert-type scale, assigned numerical ratings to each question in theWebMAC Junior- 2000 tool for the website being evaluated.Our results indicate that 1) there were differences in the utility and interest score for the websites evaluated; 2) only two websites demonstrated a significant difference inscores when compared by gender, thus male and female students tended to rate the websites similarly; and 3) predicting factors for the levels of utility and interest of the websites emerged from the data and can be used to guide the design of nutrition-related websites

Networks of Isolation: The Case of Donald J. Trump, Facebook, and the Limits of Social Movement Theory

The 2016 election that catapulted Donald J. Trump to the U.S. presidency has raised questions for how Facebook may have enabled the emergence and coalescence of a social movement among traditionally improbable voters. The research in this paper engages with contemporary social movement theory, assessing its adequacy for explaining the role of Facebook as a primary method for facilitating a social movement among the civically-alienated, who are the most unlikely of all Americans to join an organized collective for change. From a methodological perspective, the exploration takes up the case as a strategy of inquiry to explore social movement theory in the context of algorithmically-mediated social networking environments. It is concluded that the presence of a proprietary algorithmic mediator deployed by Facebook creates deliberate effects among its users which cannot be explained with social movement theory. These effects cannot be easily studied without unethical cognitive manipulations or information distortion

Visualization of Exact Invariant Solutions Associated with Atmospheric Waves in a Thin Circular Layer

The purpose of the research was to investigate the exact solutions of nonlinear shallow water equations associated with planetary equatorial waves corresponding to the Cauchy-Poisson free boundary problem describing the nonstationary motion of an incompressible perfect fluid propagating around a solid circle. We consider water waves for which the ratio of the depth of fluid above the circular bottom to the radius of the circle is small (shallow water)