Yes, Father

A Catholic Priest, my father, walks the beach in Tampa, 1968. The sun halfway through setting. Facing the water, hands in the pockets of his plaid shorts, he thinks he hears, impossibly blowing in off the empty rippling expanse, a woman singing: “A woman’s voice. It is not the voice of God, at least not the voice that I have been taught to listen for. Her song is the very essence of what we have been schooled in defining as temptation: sensual, sugary, mournful. A woman walking the waves of the sea; I wonder where she is—she who believes in me when I have no right to expect devotion of any sort, when she is the very one I abandoned. If it’s what you need to do, she said. Let’s see how it goes. And then I left. Came to this humid hell by choice and demand, headed south by travel and trope, all for an ideal that from this vantage no longer looks idyllic. She is in New York, where it is just beginning to turn hot, and the park trees are thick and full of shade, unlike the scanty palms that line this beach; their shade barely spans the expanse of my soaked brow. It seems, now that I have left, now that I am here alone—a true priest would not say alone. A true priest would say with God, but I don’t feel like I am with God. I feel alone. Lonely.https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/onearth/1005/thumbnail.jp

What Are We Doing? Capturing the Uncaptured: Workload Data to Demonstrate Service

Capturing service data can be difficult, particularly for technical services and electronic resources librarians—using standard tools such as RefTracker is cumbersome, and taking more time to enter the transaction than it actually took to perform the task is an impediment to gathering good service data. The services provided by these librarians are equally as public-facing as those provided at the reference desk, but are often not captured or reported. A possible solution is to use sent e-mail as a data source for demonstrating services provided by technical services and electronic resources librarians. This lightning round demonstrates one such approach using the categorization functions in Outlook to classify, export, and report services. The data derived from this can demonstrate public-facing services and workloads related to technical services, and the method can be extended to capturing other service metrics

Towards validation of a new computerised test of goal neglect: preliminary evidence from clinical and neuroimaging pilot studies

Objective: Goal neglect is a significant problem following brain injury, and is a target for rehabilitation. It is not yet known how neural activation might change to reflect rehabilitation gains. We developed a computerised multiple elements test (CMET), suitable for use in neuroimaging paradigms. Design: Pilot correlational study and event-related fMRI study. Methods: In Study 1, 18 adults with acquired brain injury were assessed using the CMET, other tests of goal neglect (Hotel Test; Modified Six Elements Test) and tests of reasoning. In Study 2, 12 healthy adults underwent fMRI, during which the CMET was administered under two conditions: self-generated switching and experimenter-prompted switching. Results: Among the clinical sample, CMET performance was positively correlated with both the Hotel Test (r = 0.675, p = 0.003) and the Modified Six Elements Test (r = 0.568, p = 0.014), but not with other clinical or demographic measures. In the healthy sample, fMRI demonstrated significant activation in rostro-lateral prefrontal cortex in the self-generated condition compared with the prompted condition (peak 40, 44, 4; ZE = 4.25, p(FWEcorr) = 0.026). Conclusions: These pilot studies provide preliminary evidence towards the validation of the CMET as a measure of goal neglect. Future studies will aim to further establish its psychometric properties, and determine optimum pre- and post-rehabilitation fMRI paradigms

Letter to Susan Csaky regarding revisions to the SEAALL scholarship application form, February 25, 1974

A letter from David Brennan to Susan Csaky responding to a revised SEAALL scholarship application form

Letter to Susan Csaky regarding scholarship division, April 29, 1974

A letter from David Brennan to Susan Csaky regarding the division of funds available for the Lucile Elliott Scholarship

Breaking the Formula: Integrating Performance Studies into Interpretation Preparation

Forensic educators and students spend much of their time trying to perfect a new definition of good performance without appreciating said performance or participating in the exchange process. While many studies have examined the most common interpretation ballot comments, the results and suggestions of those studies have not changed how students perform interpretation. This is where performance studies research may come into play. The author proposes ways to incorporate performance studies research into interpretation event practice and performance. Additionally, the author also suggests several new coaching techniques to bring an educational appreciation for interpretation performances

Case study: PetSmart searches for a sustainable strategy

This case details a PetSmart’s struggle to find a sustainable strategy. It was started as a “big box” pet specialty category killer store in 1986. It went public in 1993 and rapidly expanded through acquisition. It focused on product variety and price which put it in direct competition with mass merchants, especially discounters and wholesale clubs. Loses in the 1990s led the company to hire Philip Francis to turn the operation around. As a result of restructuring dictated by Mr. Francis, PetSmart became profitable. Its supply chain was improved by adding distribution centers, standardizing and down-sizing stores, improving product quality, increasing services offered, moving away from a low price orientation, and developing a customer and pet friendly in-store experience. Robert Moran took over leadership of PetSmart in 2009. His emphasis has been on realizing the humanization of pets as members of the family, focusing on PetSmart’s target market, increasing store productivity, and adding new stores more slowly

The research buyer\u27s perspective of market research effectiveness

This study examines the views of research buyers about the efficacy of market research used within their firms. A sample of research buyers from Australia's top 1000 companies was asked to evaluate the research outcomes of their most recent market research project in terms of their overall business strategy. Specialist market research buyers (insights managers) believed their commissioned research was very effective. This was in contrast to research buyers in generalist roles who did not believe in the effectiveness of the research outcomes to the same extent. The overarchlng strategic direction adopted by the buyer's firm did not make a difference to the type of research conducted (,action orientated' vs. 'knowledge enhancing'). However, entrepreneurial firms were more likely to rate their research as effective and to have dedicated research buyers generating insights into their markets. The results of this study are inconsistent with earlier studies and indicate that the market research function within Australian firms stili plays an ambiguous role