The Impact of a Corporate Adventure Program

Corporations continue to use adventure challenge activities to create or enhance a sense of cohesion, or team, within their corporate culture. The purpose of this study was to document the perceived benefits of an Adventure Challenge program on a _short term basis. The program was designed to meet specific expectations held by high ranking employees of an international accounting firm. The goals for the program were developed in consultation with instructional designers and their superiors responS1ole for the finns\u27 training and devel\u3c\u3eJ\u3ement This paper reports on efforts t.o document the impact of an adventure challenge program integrated into an extended corporate education course. Two hours of adventure challenge activities took place in the afternoon during an intensive course in business consulting. Some of the goals of the program included building a network of international cooperation, creating trust, introducing an attitude of mk taking behavior, and recognizing the importance of working as a highly functioning team. Subjects in the study were assigned to small teams of eight or more members. The groups were structured with the intent of mixing participants from different countries as well as from different levels of responsibility within the firm. Groups remained the same over the ten day period with the same facilitator. Each team participated in a similar set of activities which were carefully sequenced to provide problems of steadily increasing difficulty. Activities included many standard initiative tasks which were adapted to fit the clientele. Common names of some of those activities are the nitro crossing, zigzag, trolleys, trust sequence, Mohawk walk, and the pamper pole. Each event was followed by a debriefing session designed to create an avenue for reflection with a large group debrief finalizing the program on the last day. Opinionnaires were administered to participants prior to the start of the program. and at its conclusion. Over 125 participants from five separate schools responded to the three questionnaires developed to explore their views. An eleven item questionnaire attempted to assess the extent to which program goals were met in each specific school. The results were reported as mean scores and tested for significance using a two tailed t scores. One instrument consisted of an eleven item opinionnaire which asked participants to assess the degree to which specific program goals were met. A pretest to establish a baseline of participant views was used for comparisons after the adventure challenge component. The opinionnaire was a five point Likert scale which addressed communication, risk taking, stress management, self confidence, motivation of others, trust, conflict management, and cooperation with colleagues from different countries. Significant results were reported in the areas of communicating with colleagues from other countries and management of conflict. Four of the five reported significant changes were in self confidence. Two of five schools reported significant change in communication abilities, handling stress, and trusting associates. A second Likert scale instrument was used on a post-test basis only. This survey asked participants to rate program activities in terms of how much they enjoyed each one and the extent to which each activity reached the previously stated program goals. The results are reported as mean scores in rank order. The data suggested that it is important to provide participants with several enjoyable activities in order to have participants feel that the goals of the program were achieved. It is also interesting to note that the mean scores for meeting program goals were consistently higher than the means for enjoyment for corresponding activities. This finding suggested a level of mature reflection on the part of the respondents. It must be assumed that facilitator ability and activity sequencing has influenced the ranking of these activities. A third instrument was open ended. It asked participants to give their views on six items regarding the value of program activities and personal changes created by the program.For many participants the adventure challenge program served as a powerful socializing force. Teamwork, knowledge of others, and friendships were the most frequently mentioned worthwhile outcomes. The results provide additional support for the overall positive socializing effect of adventure challenge activities. The results of this study lend support to the belief that adventure challenge programs assist corporations in boosting self-confidence in their employees, reducing social barriers between members of the organization, and facilitating the development of a team concept.The results also suggested that the benefits are dissimilar for each participating team. In some groups improved communication with subordinates occurred, in others, several participates gained in their ability to motivate others and trust associates. The most powerful impact of the adventure challenge program was that of socializing participants from various parts of the world to one another. Participants formed friendships with others from foreign lands and worked well together to accomplish the common challenges they were asked to pursue. While the research design should be improved to provide more definitive data on the role of adventure challenge activities in corporate educational programs, this preliminary study did suggest some of the more powerful effects of such programs

Trends in Youth Development Research Topics: An Integrative Review of Positive Youth Development Research Published in Selected Journals Between 2001-2010

The body of knowledge related to positive youth development has grown in the last two decades, yet there have been few, if any, systematic investigations of the research base in the field. Therefore, the purpose of this paper was to identify the trends in research topics and approaches within the field of positive youth development over the last 10 years by examining five top-tier research journals plus one research-to-practice journal. Results revealed that only 19% of the manuscripts published in all of the selected journals had a positive youth development focus, and this was reduced to 13% when just the five top-tier research journals were considered. Analyses of the positive youth development manuscripts pertaining to population characteristics, methodology, research setting, and topical areas provide a snapshot of the trends and gaps in the body of knowledge related to youth development, and have implications for future research efforts in the field

Suppression of human immunodeficiency virus replication during acute measles.

To determine the effect of measles virus coinfection on plasma human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) RNA levels, a prospective study of hospitalized children with measles was conducted between January 1998 and October 2000 in Lusaka, Zambia. Plasma HIV RNA levels were measured during acute measles and 1 month after hospital discharge. The median plasma HIV RNA level in 33 children with measles who were followed longitudinally was 5339 copies/mL at study entry, 60,121 copies/mL at hospital discharge, and 387,148 copies/mL at 1-month follow-up. The median plasma HIV RNA level in children without acute illness was 228,454 copies/mL. Plasma levels of immune activation markers were elevated during the period of reduced plasma HIV RNA. Plasma levels of several potential HIV suppressive factors also were elevated during acute measles. HIV replication is transiently suppressed during acute measles at a time of intense immune activation

SIM PlanetQuest Key Project Precursor Observations to Detect Gas Giant Planets Around Young Stars

We present a review of precursor observing programs for the SIM PlanetQuest Key project devoted to detecting Jupiter mass planets around young stars. In order to ensure that the stars in the sample are free of various sources of astrometric noise that might impede the detection of planets, we have initiated programs to collect photometry, high contrast images, interferometric data and radial velocities for stars in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres. We have completed a high contrast imaging survey of target stars in Taurus and the Pleiades and found no definitive common proper motion companions within one arcsecond (140 AU) of the SIM targets. Our radial velocity surveys have shown that many of the target stars in Sco-Cen are fast rotators and a few stars in Taurus and the Pleiades may have sub-stellar companions. Interferometric data of a few stars in Taurus show no signs of stellar or sub-stellar companions with separations of <5 mas. The photometric survey suggests that approximately half of the stars initially selected for this program are variable to a degree (1 sigma>0.1 mag) that would degrade the astrometric accuracy achievable for that star. While the precursor programs are still a work in progress, we provide a comprehensive list of all targets ranked according to their viability as a result of the observations taken to date. By far, the observable that moves the most targets from the SIM-YSO program is photometric variability.Comment: Accepted for publication in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 25 pages, 9 figure

ACE-ASIA - Regional climatic and atmospheric chemical effects of Asian dust and pollution

Although continental-scale plumes of Asian dust and pollution reduce the amount of solar radiation reaching the earth's surface and perturb the chemistry of the atmosphere, our ability to quantify these effects has been limited by a lack of critical observations, particularly of layers above the surface. Comprehensive surface, airborne, shipboard, and satellite measurements of Asian aerosol chemical composition, size, optical properties, and radiative impacts were performed during the Asian Pacific Regional Aerosol Characterization Experiment (ACE-Asia) study. Measurements within a massive Chinese dust storm at numerous widely spaced sampling locations revealed the highly complex structure of the atmosphere, in which layers of dust, urban pollution, and biomass-burning smoke may be transported long distances as distinct entities or mixed together. The data allow a first-time assessment of the regional climatic and atmospheric chemical effects of a continental-scale mixture of dust and pollution. Our results show that radiative flux reductions during such episodes are sufficient to cause regional climate change

Addressing the unmet need for visualizing Conditional Random Fields in Biological Data

Background: The biological world is replete with phenomena that appear to be ideally modeled and analyzed by one archetypal statistical framework - the Graphical Probabilistic Model (GPM). The structure of GPMs is a uniquely good match for biological problems that range from aligning sequences to modeling the genome-to-phenome relationship. The fundamental questions that GPMs address involve making decisions based on a complex web of interacting factors. Unfortunately, while GPMs ideally fit many questions in biology, they are not an easy solution to apply. Building a GPM is not a simple task for an end user. Moreover, applying GPMs is also impeded by the insidious fact that the complex web of interacting factors inherent to a problem might be easy to define and also intractable to compute upon. Discussion: We propose that the visualization sciences can contribute to many domains of the bio-sciences, by developing tools to address archetypal representation and user interaction issues in GPMs, and in particular a variety of GPM called a Conditional Random Field(CRF). CRFs bring additional power, and additional complexity, because the CRF dependency network can be conditioned on the query data. Conclusions: In this manuscript we examine the shared features of several biological problems that are amenable to modeling with CRFs, highlight the challenges that existing visualization and visual analytics paradigms induce for these data, and document an experimental solution called StickWRLD which, while leaving room for improvement, has been successfully applied in several biological research projects.Comment: BioVis 2014 conferenc

Five Kepler target stars that show multiple transiting exoplanet candidates

We present and discuss five candidate exoplanetary systems identified with the Kepler spacecraft. These five systems show transits from multiple exoplanet candidates. Should these objects prove to be planetary in nature, then these five systems open new opportunities for the field of exoplanets and provide new insights into the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems. We discuss the methods used to identify multiple transiting objects from the Kepler photometry as well as the false-positive rejection methods that have been applied to these data. One system shows transits from three distinct objects while the remaining four systems show transits from two objects. Three systems have planet candidates that are near mean motion commensurabilities---two near 2:1 and one just outside 5:2. We discuss the implications that multitransiting systems have on the distribution of orbital inclinations in planetary systems, and hence their dynamical histories; as well as their likely masses and chemical compositions. A Monte Carlo study indicates that, with additional data, most of these systems should exhibit detectable transit timing variations (TTV) due to gravitational interactions---though none are apparent in these data. We also discuss new challenges that arise in TTV analyses due to the presence of more than two planets in a system.Comment: Accepted to Ap