Religious Nonviolence: An Analysis of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thich Nhat Hanh

This paper will look at the role religion played in shaping the individual movements of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh. “History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily…. we know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed” -Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jail. “Under a government that imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also prison” -Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience. “All violence is injustice. Responding to violence with violence is injustice, not only to the other person but also to oneself”-Thich Nhat Hanh, “Compassion as a Response to Violence.” “It is not non-violence if we love merely those that love us. It is nonviolence only when we love those that hate us. I know how difficult it is to follow this grand law of love. But are not all great and good things difficult to do?” - Mahatma Gandhi, Letter to a friend in Selections from Gandhi

The role of a training intervention in reducing email overload and improving productivity

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, School of Human and Community Development, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts by coursework and research report in the field of in Organisational Psychology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg September 2017Emails have become a fundamental computer application and business tool, in organisations across the global. This is because of the accessibility and convenience of emails which have generated an array of benefits to both employees and their organisations. However, this accessibility has led to an over-reliance on emails, which often has the negative consequence of email overload. Email overload continues to be a recurring issues experienced by employees universally, which research has found to have negative implications on employees’ wellbeing and productivity. Yet there has been limited research, particularly in South Africa, that aims to reduce email overload among employees. Thus, this research report investigated how the role of providing employees with a job resource (training intervention) could increase perceived productivity and eliminate email overload and change caused by the job demands (emails) on employees .In order to examine this effect, this research utilised a pretest post-test control group design on order to compare the impact of a training intervention in reducing email overload and increasing productivity. The quantitative results revealed that the training intervention contributed to a decrease in feelings of email overload among the participants. Additionally, focus groups were administered to determine participants’ experience with emails both prior to the training and after the training, to gain a clearer understanding of the best practices used to eliminate email overload. These findings observed that the participants transferred learnt contents from training into their working lives. Thus research both further contributes to other research currently associated with email and email overload, and also provides a greater understanding of the need to provide employees with job resources much like training intervention in order to counteract those job demands like emails, that are often ignored.XL201

Rhodium-Catalyzed Carbon-Carbon Bond Activation and Functionalization Using Imine Reactions

The activation and functionalization of carbon-carbon single bonds has proven difficult to achieve using traditional organic methods. Previous Johnson Lab projects have explored the use of rhodium catalysts to permit the selective activation and functionalization of carbon-carbon bonds in ketones. However, these reactions have required a nearby nitrogen atom, presumably to coordinate with the rhodium. Herein, we explore a new type of reaction in which the coordinating nitrogen is provided by reversible imine formation from a ketone and a primary amine. Efforts towards making this reaction more generalizable are currently underway

Living in Peace: Host-Microbiota Mutualism in the Skin

Commensal microbes colonize the skin where they promote immune development and prevent infection without inducing damaging inflammatory responses. In this issue of Cell Host & Microbe, Scharschmidt et al. (2017) show that during hair follicle development, commensals induce regulatory T cell migration to the skin to ensure cutaneous homeostasis