Shortcuts to failure: why business ethics matter. A case study of one healthcare agency in the United Kingdom

The aim of this case study is to provide a better understanding of how ethical behavior can be beneficial for a company and how cutting corners to gain short term profits will eventually harm a company in the long run. This case study describes, explores, explains and analyzes ethics and its role in management, training and motivation, and the advantages of incorporating ethics in business operations. The case study presented is about a healthcare agency in the UK.O objectivo deste estudo consiste em fornecer uma melhor compreensão de como um comportamento ético pode beneficiar uma empresa e como evitando demoras para ganhar benefícios a curto prazo se pode, a longo prazo, prejudicá-la. Este estudo descreve, explora, explica e analisa a ética e o seu papel na gestão, treino e motivação, e as vantagems de incorporar a ética nas operações comerciais. O estudo apresentado diz respeito a uma agência de cuidados de saúde no Reino Unido

Is Rabeprazole A Safe Treatment for Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease in Children Ages 1-16 years?

Objective: The objective of the selective EBM review is to determine whether or not Rabeprazole is a safe treatment for GERD in children less than sixteen years old. Study Design: Review of three randomized controlled studies. All three studies were published in English between 2007-2013. Data Sources: Three randomized, un-blinded, controlled studies found using Medline and PubMed Outcomes Measured: Each trial measured the adverse events that occurred with the use of Rabeprazole for the treatment of GERD in children less than sixteen years of age. This was done by using subjective reporting of treatment-emergent adverse events (TEAE’s). Differences in the frequency of Treatment Emergent Signs and Symptoms (TESS) between the two treatment groups analyzed using the Fischer exact test and/or an appropriate nonparametric procedure. Results: Three un-blinded RCT’s were included in this review and it was found that Rabeprazole did not lead to any significant life-threatening treatment-emergent adverse events (TEAE’s) in patients less than sixteen years of age. The most common adverse events were headache, nausea, cough, vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea. Conclusions: Based on these three trials, Rabeprazole is a safe treatment for GERD in children less than sixteen years of age. Each study showed a significant improvement of symptoms without any serious side effects when using Rabeprazole

Spectroscopic Analysis of the Traditional Cyanotype Process and its Impact on Art

Reflectance spectroscopy was used to study the cyanotype printing process. Originally this process was used to make photocopies of building designs, but today it is used for art. The cyanotype process is a photo catalyzed oxidation-reduction reaction. This study altered the concentrations and reagents involved in the printing process, and it included the use of ammonium ferricyanide and ammonium iron(III) oxalate along with the traditional potassium ferricyanide and ammonium iron(III) citrate. The impact of these changes on the rate of formation of Prussian blue was observed and quantified. Rate laws and general trends were determined for the reagents involved. Qualitative analysis of the various images was performed through the use of a survey. Participants were asked to rank cyanotypes, made from various chemical combinations, on the qualities of color, consistency, clarity, artistic appeal, and texture. This work provided a better understanding of the chemistry involved in the Cyanotype process, which will hopefully lead to better art production and conservation

PolyFlowBuilder: An Intuitive Tool for Academic Planning at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

PolyFlowBuilder is a web application that lets users create visually intuitive flowcharts to aid in academic planning at Cal Poly. These flowcharts can be customized in a variety of ways to accurately represent complex academic plans, such as double majors, minors, taking courses out- of-order, etc. The original version of PolyFlowBuilder, released Summer 2020, was not written for continued expansion and growth. Therefore, a complete rewrite was determined to be necessary to enable the project to grow in the future. This report details the process to completely rewrite the existing version of PolyFlowBuilder over the course of six months, using NodeJS, SvelteKit, TypeScript, MySQL, Prisma, and TailwindCSS + DaisyUI for the primary tech stack. The project was determined to be largely successful by a variety of holistic evaluation criteria, with the main limiting factor to complete success being time constraints. The rewritten version of PolyFlowBuilder will ensure the project’s continued success

Towards Engineering and Understanding of Guest Host Interaction Between Dopants and Liquid Crystals in Liquid Crystal Displays

Liquid crystal displays are intricate devices which consist of many cells that are filled with liquid crystal hosts. The operation of the liquid crystal cell is to modulate the polarisation of light, by varying their birefringence, which in turn can be used to control the intensity of light and colour as a function of time. Many individual cells grouped together can be controlled to give specific intensity of light and colour, to build up images that are viewed on displays, i.e. pictures on TV’s. The properties of the liquid crystalline material used in a cell dictate the performance of the device which they are used. Commercially used liquid crystal material is typically a multi-component system that exhibits many physical properties such as birefringence, dielectric anisotropy, voltage holding ratio, visco-elastic, guest-host effect and the kinetic switching response time of the cell between the on state and off state. By manipulating the physical properties we can exert specific control over the properties of the cell of particular importance in display applications is the speed with which cells can be turned between the on and off state; these are known as the rise and decay response times respectively. Introducing guest molecules into the liquid crystal host may alter the dielectric anisotropy which potentially increases the speed of the switching process, making the device faster. Guest molecules must be compatible with the dielectrically positive or negative liquid crystal host allowing good mixing of the components and alignment between the guest molecule and liquid crystal molecule. This compatibility is important as it allows both, guest and host, to align with the applied electric field when turned on giving the on state of the cell and when turned off allowing both to re-align with the alignment layer in the cell bringing to the cell order of the medium back to the off state of the cell. The time taken for the cell to reach the on state and off state is an important part of this study. Dopants have been designed with a head, tail and linker core moiety that are compatible with dielectrically positive and negative liquid crystals. Head groups will have polar substituents such as heteroarenes, fluorine and bromine, to exert control over the dielectric anisotropy. Alkoxy or alkyl tails were selected to increase solubility and size compatibility with the liquid crystal hosts. The linkers between the two arenes were selected as acetylene (linear, large Raman cross-section) and ether, methylene and propylene (to bring about a bend in the molecule). The switching times for liquid crystal devices are studied using an electro-optic method developed in conjunction with SONY MSL (Stuttgart). These studies enable analysis of the transmission of light through the cell as it goes from the on/off state as a function of time and applied potential. By comparison with the currently used liquid crystal materials our work shows that the level of doping, the length of the tail and the nature of the linker do affect the switching time significantly. It is shown that a non-linear linker, which introduces a ‘bite angle’ within the guest molecule brings about the best increase in response times. Time-Resolved Raman spectroscopy studies of a liquid crystal cell during the turn on/off process were made. These demonstrate the capability of this technique to measure the orientation of the molecules as a function of time as well allowing the independent motion of the guest and host molecules during the switching process. Raman spectroscopy gives a useful insight into the behaviour of the guest and host materials in an operating liquid crystal cell

Growing Up Behind Bars: Pathways To Desistance For Juvenile Lifers

In the wake of the landmark Supreme Court decision Miller vs. Alabama, a variety of state laws have paved the way for the resentencing and potential release of “juvenile lifers.” Desistance theories pertaining to youth with histories of violent offending suggest that a blend of maturation, internal motivation and identity shifts, and opportunities to adopt and fulfill adult roles will lead to cessation of criminal behavior. Yet, these theories may not apply to young people serving life sentences, as they have limited opportunity to adopt adult responsibilities while imprisoned, less motivation to desist if freedom is not viewed as attainable and live in conditions in which criminal behavior and violence is often essential for survival. This qualitative study explored pathways to desistance behind bars for adult males (now aged 40–65), all of whom were convicted of a homicide offense at age 20 or under and were recently paroled under one of several California youth offender resentencing laws. The phenomenological design included two in-depth individual interviews and inductive thematic analysis. Analysis identified three patterns of desistance, all of which converged to core themes of moral reckoning, making meaning of life in prison, finding hope, and proving one’s worth for release. The results have implications for youth offender resentencing policies and theories of criminal desistance

Other grounds: popular genres and the rhetoric of anthropology, 1900-1940

Other Grounds: Popular Genres and the Rhetoric of Anthropology, 1900-1940, examines how gender, race, and genre interact in a discipline's bid for scientific status. As anthropology professionalized early in the twentieth century, the ethnographic monograph became the primary site for legitimate scientific knowledge, and many practitioners-- especially women and Native Americans-- found their concerns and knowledge practices marginalized. These marginalized professionals responded creatively to the monograph's ascendance by developing alternative genres flexible and capacious enough to accommodate their intellectual and rhetorical goals. This study recovers a proliferation of alternative genres, including field autobiographies, folklore collections, and ethnographic novels, that rhetors created in the early twentieth century to access rhetorical resources unavailable in the discipline's privileged forms. I demonstrate that marginalized rhetors, including Gladys Reichard, Ruth Underhill, Ann Axtell Morris, Frank Applegate, Luther Standing Bear, and others, used these hybrid genres to influence professional practice and to intervene in broader debates taking place outside professional boundaries-- debates, for instance, over indigenous land rights and federal Indian education policy. For scholars in rhetoric, this project offers a critical vocabulary for analyzing spatial-rhetorical practices, by (1) connecting contemporary genre theory with studies of spatial rhetorics, (2) analyzing a range of spatial tropes and topoi, and (3) introducing for critical use such terms as rhetorical scarcity, rhetorical trajectories, and rhetorical recruitment. Ultimately, this project critiques the power of spatial representations to naturalize relations of domination, and recovers inventive rhetorical strategies that use spatial representations to call for-- and create-- knowledge that demands ethical response and action