The role of leadership in student organizations

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent to which the leaders of the Eta Delta chapter of Beta Alpha Psi (BAP) and the JMU Women’s Rugby club embody the characteristics of the leaders of successful organizations by examining these two organizations in the context of the characteristics of successful organizational cultures. In order to conduct an appropriate examination of the cultures of these two organizations, I chose to compare them to the characteristics of successful group cultures presented in Daniel Coyle’s The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups. Throughout his book, Coyle highlights the characteristics that define and distinguish organizations that experience short-term success from those who are successful in the long-term. These characteristics are derived from numerous examples of successful groups that range from SEAL Team Six to Zappos, from the San Antonio Spurs to IDEO, and from the Upright Citizens Brigade to the New Zealand All-Blacks. In each of these diverse groups, Coyle identifies cultural traits that distinguish these successful organizations from their contemporaries. He then combines these traits to form a comprehensive framework of a successful organizational culture, and bases the structure of this book on a discussion and analysis of his discoveries. Coyle also incorporates the personality traits of the organizations’ leaders into his discussion, and successfully draws connections between leadership styles that, at a distance, seem poles apart from one another but when examined in closer detail, prove to be oriented towards reaching the same overarching goals. The layout of this paper models the layout of Coyle’s book in an attempt to mimic his discussion with that of my own experiences in BAP and JMU Women’s Rugby. By using this source to compare the structures, purposes, and cultures of these two organizations, as well as the role of the leadership team in each, I hope to conduct an adequate discussion and explanation of the differences in each of the organizations as a whole, as well as in the extent to which each required me to perform an effective leadership role compared to how Coyle describes such a role in The Culture Code

John

Non-fiction by W.H. McAnalle

Compression-tension Hysteretic Response of Cold-formed Steel C-stection Framing Members

This paper summarizes results from an experimental program designed to evaluate the tension-compression cyclic axial response of cold-formed steel C-section structural framing members. A new cyclic loading protocol for cold formed steel members is presented that defines the target axial displacement based on elastic buckling parameters. The protocol is used to explore the cyclic response of members experiencing local buckling, distortional buckling, and global buckling deformation. In the experiments, post-bucking energy dissipation was observed along with tension stretching and softening. The quantity of dissipated energy per cycle increased as cross-section and global slenderness decreased. Specimens experiencing local and distortional buckling dissipated more energy per half-wavelength than those experiencing global buckling

Synthetic Text Generation with Differential Privacy: A Simple and Practical Recipe

Privacy concerns have attracted increasing attention in data-driven products due to the tendency of machine learning models to memorize sensitive training data. Generating synthetic versions of such data with a formal privacy guarantee, such as differential privacy (DP), provides a promising path to mitigating these privacy concerns, but previous approaches in this direction have typically failed to produce synthetic data of high quality. In this work, we show that a simple and practical recipe in the text domain is effective: simply fine-tuning a pretrained generative language model with DP enables the model to generate useful synthetic text with strong privacy protection. Through extensive empirical analyses on both benchmark and private customer data, we demonstrate that our method produces synthetic text that is competitive in terms of utility with its non-private counterpart, meanwhile providing strong protection against potential privacy leakages.Comment: ACL 2023 Main Conference (Honorable Mention

Getting evidence into policy: The need for deliberative strategies?

Getting evidence into policy is notoriously difficult. In this empirical case study we used document analysis and key informant interviews to explore the Australian federal government’s policy to implement a national bowel cancer screening programme, and the role of evidence in this policy. Our analysis revealed a range of institutional limitations at three levels of national government: within the health department, between government departments, and across the whole of government. These limitations were amplified by the pressures of the 2004 Australian federal election campaign. Traditional knowledge utilisation approaches, which rely principally on voluntarist strategies and focus on the individual, rather than the institutional level, are often insufficient to ensure evidence-based implementation. We propose three alternative models, based on deliberative strategies which have been shown to work in other settings: review of the evidence by a select group of experts whose independence is enshrined in legislation and whose imprimatur is required before policy can proceed; use of an advisory group of experts who consult widely with stakeholders and publish their review findings; or public discussion of the evidence by the media and community groups who act as more direct conduits to the decision-makers than researchers. Such deliberative models could help overcome the limitations on the use of evidence by embedding public review of evidence as the first step in the institutional decision-making processes. Highlights  Achieving evidence-based policy implementation is much harder than the rhetoric suggests.  Our case study showed traditional voluntarist approaches are not enough to overcome institutional filtering of the evidence.  Deliberative strategies open up the decision-making processes to greater expert and public scrutiny.  Our framework illustrates the potential for deliberative strategies to increase the relative weight of evidence in policy.  This article challenges researchers and policy-makers to acknowledge and address the institutional context of decision-making. Keywords: Australia; Health policy; Decision-making; Evidence; Knowledge utilisation; Bowel cancer; Screening; DeliberativeNHMR

Mental Well-Being in UK Higher Education During Covid-19: Do Students Trust Universities and the Government?

This paper draws upon the concept of recreancy to examine the mental well-being of university students during the Covid-19 pandemic. Briefly, recreancy is loss of societal trust that results when institutional actors can no longer be counted on to perform their responsibilities. Our study of mental well-being and recreancy focuses on the role of universities and government regulators within the education sector. We surveyed 600 UK students attending 161 different public higher education providers in October 2020 during a time when many UK students were isolated in their residences and engaged in online learning. We assessed student well-being using the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (scored 7–35) and found the mean score to be 19.9 [95% confidence interval (CI) 19.6, 20.2]. This level of well-being indicates that a significant proportion of UK students face low levels of mental well-being. Structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis indicates that high recreancy—measured as a low trust in universities and the government—is associated with low levels of mental well-being across the student sample. While these findings are suggestive, they are also important and we suggest that government and university leaders should not only work to increase food and housing security during the Covid-19 pandemic, but also consider how to combat various sector trends that might intensify recreancy

Food Insecurity and Lived Experience of Students (FILES)

This paper provides evidence of the impact of Covid-19 on higher education students’ levels of food security and lived experiences. We surveyed higher education students, attending three universities in the UK and one in the USA, from 1st April to 30th April 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic and after universities closed the majority of their buildings and ceased campus-based teaching. A total of 1,234 surveys were returned. The preliminary findings show that nearly 35% of students surveyed reported low or very low levels of food security and 41% of students were worried that their food would run out. We also found high levels of poor mental health and well-being; and mental health was associated with level of food security. The best predictor of the level of food security was students’ living arrangements during the Covid-19 pandemic. Students who were living on their own or with other students were more likely to experience low or very low levels of food insecurity compared to those students living with family members. The financial data collected show that many students relied on employment as their main source of income, and students are very worried about their current financial security. Furthermore, we found a relatively high reliance on ultra-processed foods as the main food type in students’ diets. The data from open-ended questions lend further support to the quantitative findings reported and provide further insight into students’ lived experiences. Finally, this paper concludes with key recommendations for policy makers, universities and student unions. (Submitted to the Education Select Committee Inquiry on The impact of COVID-19 on education and children’s services, 03 June 2020) FILES is a research collaboration involving a number of academics and student union officers from across England, Northern Ireland and the USA. The group’s key objective is to research food insecurity and lived experiences of students in Higher Education. Food insecurity has been explored in other populations, but no evidence has been presented that examines food insecurity and lived experiences of students in higher education following Covid-19 lockdown. Authors: Professor Greta Defeyter, Professor Paul Stretesky, Dr Mike Long, Dr Sinéad Furey, Dr Christian Reynolds, Dr Alyson Dodds, Dr Debbie Porteous, Dr Emily Mann, Mrs Christine Stretesky, Ms Anna Kemp, Mr James Fox, Mr Andrew McAnalle

'Croke Park goes Plumb Crazy' Gaelic Games in Pathé Newsreels, 1920–1939

From the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, and over the next two decades, arose great efforts in Ireland to augment political independence from Britain with enhanced cultural separation. During this period the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) enjoyed a boom in numbers of players and supporters, thus confirming hurling and Gaelic football as the definitively Irish national games and the association itself as the most popular mass movement for the expression of independent Irish identity. Yet paradoxically, given the popular association of Gaelic games with Irish independence, nearly all footage of these games from that time was produced by foreign companies with a strong British bias. This article will focus primarily on the coverage of Pathé, a leading newsreel company in this period, through an examination of the content of relevant films in the online digital archive of British Pathé, and will explore the conditions of their production and reception in Ireland, including by the GAA, which was usually wary of portrayals in the British media.peer-reviewe