Mechanical-electrical stress studies of porcelain insulator bodies ; a report of an investigation conducted by the Engineering Experiment Station, University of Illinois, in co??peration with the Utilities Research Commission

Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-70)

Book review: enhancing teaching practice in higher educationedited by Helen Pokorny and Digby Warren

In Enhancing Teaching Practice in Higher Education, editors Helen Pokorny and Digby Warren bring together contributors to explore research, theory, models and frameworks for enhancing HE teaching practice, covering topics including course design, assessment and student engagement. John Cullen welcomes this volume for providing vital practical guidance, support and encouragement to Higher Education teachers at all stages of their careers

The writing skills course as an introduction to critical practice for larger business undergraduate classes

Calls for greater levels of critical thought in business and management education increased in the wake of the global financial crisis. Many business educators articulated a need to develop students who engage with theory at the deepest level in order to cultivate more socially engaged managers and management thinkers. These calls surfaced at a time when or organisations voiced concerns about the quality of the basic literacy and numeracy skills of graduates. It is often difficult to introduce students to critical practice at the undergraduate level due to larger class sizes, with the result that deeper theoretical engagement is often postponed until postgraduate stages of business education. This paper discusses the findings from an action research project conducted on a critical writing skills project which aimed to introduce a group of 95 first-year business students to the concept of critical practice through their written assignments. The research unearthed some opportunities, challenges and possible pitfalls associated with deploying a critical writing skills module paper, with the aim of informing practice and signposting future research needs

Researching Workplace Spiritualization through Auto/ethnography

Studying the spiritual in workplace settings presents a significant challenge to the organizational ethnographer. Spirituality is such a fluid and deeply subjective concept that is often understood and practiced in ways that are implicit to individuals and attempts to study it in the workplace risk producing accounts that reductive and inaccurate. In an effort to craft a rigorous and representative account of the deployment of a Spiritual Management Development (SMD) initiative in large services organization, I experimented with a form of autoethnography, referred to as ‘auto/ethnography’ in this paper, which attempted to produce a rounded and holistic account of reactions to the initiative. The generic elements of this method are presented with a view to demonstrating the possibilities and difficulties associated with adopting this research approach to the study of workplace spirituality. I experimented with a form of autoethnography, referred to as ‘auto/ ethnography’ in this article, which attempted to produce a rounded and holistic account of reactions to the initiative. The generic elements of this method are presented with a view to demonstrating the possibilities and difficulties associated with adopting this research approach to the study of workplace spirituality

A study of brass instrument acoustics using an artificial lip reed mechanism, laser Doppler anemometry and other techniques

The self-sustained oscillation of a brass wind musical instrument involves a complex aerodynamic coupling between a multimode mechanical vibratory system (the lips of the player) and a multimode acoustical vibratory system (the air column of the instrument). In this thesis the behaviour of the coupled system near the threshold of oscillation is investigated using a simplified model in which a single mechanical lip mode is coupled to a single mode of the acoustical resonator by air flow through the lips. The theoretical threshold behaviour is compared with the measured threshold behaviour of a trombone sounded by an artificial lip reed mechanism. Comparability between theory and experiment is ensured by using model parameter values derived from mechanical response measurements on the artificial lips and input impedance measurements on the trombone.The mechanical response measurements can be used to classify mechanical modes of the artificial lips unambiguously as either "inward striking" or "outward striking". Each of the embouchures considered is found to have at least one mechanical mode of each category. The experimentally observed threshold frequencies of the coupled system suggest a behaviour which passes smoothly from "inward striking" to "outward striking" character as the trombone slide is extended or the embouchure parameters changed. It seems unlikely that this type of behaviour can be explained using a lip model with only a single degree of freedom.After a discussion of the theory of laser Doppler anemome!ry (LDA), the technique is applied to the problem of measuring the instantaneous acoustic particle velocity within a standing wave pipe driven by a loudspeaker. The resulting Doppler signals display quasi-periodic amplitude modulation with a fundamental frequency equal to the frequency of the acoustic field. The phenomenon of amplitude modulation is investigated in some detail.Two different methods of analysing Doppler signals are compared: the digit~l Hilbert transform and the Disa analogue frequency tracker; the analogue tracker is found to offer the greater signal-to-noise ratio and dynamic range. Experiments are carried out to establish how phase errors introduced by the analogue tracker can be minimised:,Velocity measurements extracted from Doppler signals using the analogue tracker are compared with the velocity deduced by applying basic theory to probe microphone pressure measurements. It is found that the acoustic particle velocity amplitude can be measured accurately over the entire frequency range considered, and the phase of the acoustic particle velocity also agrees well with theory, but not at low frequencies. LDA is successfully applied to the measurement of multi-harmonic sound fields. The technique of ensemble averaging velocity signals is shown to be particularly useful.LDA is used to measure the velocity in the backbore of a specially designed transparent mouthpiece, driven by the artificial lip reed. Although significant levels of turbulence are encountered, it is shown that acoustic components can still be clearly distinguished in frequency domain representations of the measured velocity. However LDA measurements in the mouthpiece are restricted to conditions where the acoustic particle velocity amplitude and the turbulent intensity are sufficiently low to ensure that the bandwidth of the Doppler signal is less than the bandwidth of the apparatus used to capture or process the Doppler signal.LDA measurements in brass instrument mouthpieces should provide a better understanding of the air flow into the mouthpiece and may lead to an improved model for self-sustained oscillation of the coupled system which more accurately describes the air flow

Indexing sustainability-oriented employment opportunities in the Irish recruitment market: Technical note (1st February 2014)

For the last number of years, the National University of Ireland Maynooth has run a programme known as ‘SPUR’ (Summer Programme for Undergraduate Researchers). SPUR participants work on research projects relevant to academic units within the university, and gain experience of scholarly research. The programme is usually very competitive, and in Summer 2013 I was fortunate to mentor a very talented undergraduate student, Frances Bell, who collected data for a project on the relationship between recruitment markets and sustainability ‐ oriented management education in Ireland. As part of her work on this project, Frances had utilized a ‘top ten’ listing of online recruitment sites (Fawcett, 2013) and found 62 job postings for positions which had ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustain’ advertised in the Republic of Ireland. The sites which had identified the most ‘hits’ over the six ‐ week time period that she had collected data are listed in the Method section below, and these have been employed as part of this projec

Designing Large Class Teaching for Inclusiveness: Introducing Universal Instructional Design to teaching Strategies, Learning Resources and Student Resources

Abstract included in text

Are Schwartz & Carroll’s 5 Business & Society Frameworks Still Dominant?

In 2008, Business & Society published Schwartz and Carroll's description of five central frameworks that had come to dominate the field of Business & Society. Although frequently cited, there has been no empirical analysis or verification of these frameworks or inter-relationships between them. This research note aims to address this by providing bibliometric data on peer-reviewed research outputs conducted on these frameworks since this article first appeared. ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ and ‘Stakeholder Management Theory’ are clearly the most researched frameworks, and ‘Sustainability’ has demonstrated significant growth over the ten years since the article was first published. ‘Business Ethics’ and (to a greater extent) ‘Corporate Citizenship’ appear to have grown less as research fields, but there may be some evidence of areas of ‘cross-over’ between fields. The limitations of this research are discussed alongside avenues and opportunities for developing deeper understanding of these business & society frameworks