Soft Skill Development and College Student Preparedness for the Workforce: How Can University and College Departments Help?

This study explores workforce preparedness of traditional college age students (ages 18-22) and the role of soft skills. Much of the literature indicates that employer perception is that recent graduates are not prepared to enter the workforce because of a lack of soft skill recognition and/or development. This study identifies the important soft skills and examines how colleges and universities educate and develop those skills in their students. Much of the current literature shows that college and universities efforts are not sufficient. The study will aim to determine if intentional soft skills training sessions for students are helpful in preparing them for the workforce. The study will suggest ways that academic departments, extracurricular departments, and student employers can help educate and develop soft skills in students. Further, the information collected will inform university departments (both extracurricular and academic) how best to approach soft skills development among students using key leadership theories in the development process; transformational leadership, leaderful leadership, and situational leadership

Ecological resilience in lakes and the conjunction fallacy

There is a pressing need to apply stability and resilience theory to environmental management to restore degraded ecosystems effectively and to mitigate the effects of impending environmental change. Lakes represent excellent model case studies in this respect and have been used widely to demonstrate theories of ecological stability and resilience that are needed to underpin preventative management approaches. However, we argue that this approach is not yet fully developed because the pursuit of empirical evidence to underpin such theoretically grounded management continues in the absence of an objective probability framework. This has blurred the lines between intuitive logic (based on the elementary principles of probability) and extensional logic (based on assumption and belief) in this field

Minimal information for studies of extracellular vesicles (MISEV2023): From basic to advanced approaches

Extracellular vesicles (EVs), through their complex cargo, can reflect the state of their cell of origin and change the functions and phenotypes of other cells. These features indicate strong biomarker and therapeutic potential and have generated broad interest, as evidenced by the steady year-on-year increase in the numbers of scientific publications about EVs. Important advances have been made in EV metrology and in understanding and applying EV biology. However, hurdles remain to realising the potential of EVs in domains ranging from basic biology to clinical applications due to challenges in EV nomenclature, separation from non-vesicular extracellular particles, characterisation and functional studies. To address the challenges and opportunities in this rapidly evolving field, the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles (ISEV) updates its 'Minimal Information for Studies of Extracellular Vesicles', which was first published in 2014 and then in 2018 as MISEV2014 and MISEV2018, respectively. The goal of the current document, MISEV2023, is to provide researchers with an updated snapshot of available approaches and their advantages and limitations for production, separation and characterisation of EVs from multiple sources, including cell culture, body fluids and solid tissues. In addition to presenting the latest state of the art in basic principles of EV research, this document also covers advanced techniques and approaches that are currently expanding the boundaries of the field. MISEV2023 also includes new sections on EV release and uptake and a brief discussion of in vivo approaches to study EVs. Compiling feedback from ISEV expert task forces and more than 1000 researchers, this document conveys the current state of EV research to facilitate robust scientific discoveries and move the field forward even more rapidly

Domestic Museums of Decolonisation? Objects, Colonial Officials, and the Afterlives of Empire in Britain

This chapter draws on recent oral history research undertaken in the homes of former colonial civil servants to consider the relationship between objects and the formation and narration of memories of colonial service. It combines oral history and material culture approaches to consider how former colonial officials who served in the latter years of empire and decolonisation remember and memorialise colonial encounters within their contemporary homes. Described by Anthony Kirk-Greene as the ‘ultimate diaspora’ of decolonization, the 25,000 plus colonial officials who returned to Britain at the end of empire brought with them a vast array of items from former colonial territories. Many of these diverse objects remain present in contemporary homes and still act as tangible, quotidian reminders of past lives and encounters. Within the retrospective narratives of many former officials, mostly now in their 80s and 90s, a sense of nostalgia is pervasive; however, this often goes beyond an uncomplicated lament for lost status and privilege to reveal much about the impact of lifecycle and affective entanglements in shaping postcolonial narratives of empire. In this chapter, we will explore questions of memory, nostalgia and domestic display through a series of interviews with former colonial officials and their spouses about objects brought ‘home’ from empire. It considers how this group remembers the dislocations of decolonisation and have incorporated memories of imperial service into their post-colonial domestic lives. The idiosyncratic curation of domestic space reveals how objects can present personal narratives and memories of places and individuals encountered during careers in empire, but also become habituated into quotidian twenty-first century life. Objects frequently play a key role in mediating these memories and supporting highly selective accounts of the end of empire, but they also provide a means to interrogate these narratives more rigorously. Exploring the meanings of objects as markers of memory, this paper charts the confluence of material culture, memory and autobiography in shaping post-colonial narratives of empire amongst former officials