1,287 research outputs found

    “Why Can’t Our Majors Write?”: Cross-Disciplinary Collaborations with the Writing Center

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    The presenters aim to help WPAs and faculty gain insight into how to collaborate with colleagues from across disciplines to improve student writing. Participants will learn specific techniques for immediate use in supporting the writing development of upper-level undergraduates in their major classes and in their chosen professions

    High-Performance Work Systems as an Initiator of Employee Proactivity and Flexible Work Processes

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    We offer a conceptual framework that explicates the effect of high-performance work systems (HPWS) on the flexibility of organizational work processes. The flexibility of work processes is conceptualized as the extent to which organizational work routines can be modified by employees to better exploit existing capabilities or be adapted to explore new alternatives. We argue that HPWS directly facilitate individual proactivity, and foster a supportive social structure that further enables individuals to be proactive in modifying their work processes. The proposed model is in response to calls for researchers to consider proximal outcomes related to the use of human resource management (HRM) systems and, more specifically, the need to better understand how HRM systems can enable employees to respond to threats and opportunities. Future research issues are also considered, including recommendations for empirical assessment of how employees modify their work processes

    BAKHTIN’S CARNIVALESQUE: A GAUGE OF DIALOGISM IN SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET CINEMA

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    This dissertation examines fifteen films produced in seven political eras from 1926 thru 2008 in Soviet / Post-Soviet Russia. Its aim is to determine if the cinematic presence of Bakhtin’s ten signifiers of the carnivalesque (parody, death, grotesque display, satirical humor, billingsgate, metaphor, fearlessness, madness, the mask, and the interior infinite) increase in their significance with the historical progression from a totalitarian State (e.g., USSR under Stalin) to a federal semi-residential constitutional republic (e.g., The Russian Federation under Yeltsin - Putin). In this study, the carnivalesque signifiers act as a gauge of dialogism, the presence of which is indicative of some cinematic freedom of expression. The implication being, that in totalitarian States, a progressive relaxation of censorship in cinema (and conversely, an increase in cinematic freedom of expression) is indicative of a move towards a more representative form of governance, (e.g., the collapse of the totalitarian State). The fifteen films analyzed in this study include: Battleship Potemkin (1925), End of St. Petersburg (1927), Chapaev (1934), Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1946, released in 1958), Spring on Zarechnaya Street (1956), The Cranes are Flying (1957), Stalker (1979), Siberiade (1979), The Legend of Suram Fortress (1984), Repentance (1984, released in 1987), Cold Summer of 1953 (1987), Little Vera (1988), Burnt by the Sun (1994), House of Fools (2002) and Russian Ark (2002). All fifteen films were produced in the Soviet/Post-Soviet space and directed by Russian filmmakers; hence, the films portray a distinctly Russian perspective on reality. These films emphasize various carnivalesque features including the reversal of conventional hierarchies, usually promoting the disprivileged masses to the top, thus turning them into heroes at the expense of traditional power structures

    Autonomous mission planning and scheduling: Innovative, integrated, responsive

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    Autonomous mission scheduling, a new concept for NASA ground data systems, is a decentralized and distributed approach to scientific spacecraft planning, scheduling, and command management. Systems and services are provided that enable investigators to operate their own instruments. In autonomous mission scheduling, separate nodes exist for each instrument and one or more operations nodes exist for the spacecraft. Each node is responsible for its own operations which include planning, scheduling, and commanding; and for resolving conflicts with other nodes. One or more database servers accessible to all nodes enable each to share mission and science planning, scheduling, and commanding information. The architecture for autonomous mission scheduling is based upon a realistic mix of state-of-the-art and emerging technology and services, e.g., high performance individual workstations, high speed communications, client-server computing, and relational databases. The concept is particularly suited to the smaller, less complex missions of the future

    Plant nutrients in rainfall

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    Plant and Soil Science

    Antibody responses to a Cryptosporidium parvum rCP15/60 vaccine

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    Cryptosporidium parvum is a zoonotic apicomplexa-protozoan pathogen that causes gastroenteritis and diarrhoea in mammals worldwide. The organism is transmitted by ingestion of oocysts, which are shed in faeces, and completes its lifecycle in a single host.^1^ C. parvum is ubiquitous on dairy operations worldwide and is one of the leading causes of diarrhoea in calves on these farms.^2,3^ Here, for the first time, we describe the antibody response in a large group of cows to a recombinant C. parvum oocyst surface protein (rCP15/60) vaccine and the antibody response in calves fed rCP15/60-immune colostrum produced by these vaccinated cows. Results of recent genotype surveys indicate that calves are the only major reservoir for C. parvum infections in humans.^4^ Human C. parvum infections are particularly prevalent and often fatal in neonates in developing countries and to immunocompromised people, such as AIDs patients.^4^ Drug therapy against cryptosporidiosis is limited and not wholly efficacious in either humans or calves^5^, making development of an effective vaccine of paramount importance. To date, there is no commercially available effective vaccine against C. parvum, although passive immunization utilizing different zoite surface (glyco)proteins has showed promise.^6-9^ All cows we vaccinated produced an antibody response to the rCP15/60 vaccine and the magnitude of response correlated strongly with the subsequent level of antibody in their colostrum. All calves fed rCP15/60-immune colostrum showed a dose-dependent absorption of antibody. Our results demonstrate that vaccination of cows with rCP15/60 successfully induces antibodies against CP15/60 in their serum and colostrum and that these antibodies are then well absorbed when fed to neonatal calves. With further research, this C. parvum vaccine may well be a practical method of conferring passive protection to calves against cryptosporidiosis. Furthermore, a specifically targeted immune-colostrum may be valuable in protection and treatment of immunocompromised human patients with cryptosporidiosis

    An efficient method of evaluating multiple concurrent management actions on invasive populations

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    Evaluating the efficacy of management actions to control invasive species is crucial for maintaining funding and to provide feedback for the continual improvement of management efforts. However, it is often difficult to assess the efficacy of control methods due to limited resources for monitoring. Managers may view effort on monitoring as effort taken away from performing management actions. We developed a method to estimate invasive species abundance, evaluate management effectiveness, and evaluate population growth over time from a combination of removal activities (e.g., trapping, ground shooting) using only data collected during removal efforts (method of removal, date, location, number of animals removed, and effort). This dynamic approach allows for abundance estimation at discrete time points and the estimation of population growth between removal periods. To test this approach, we simulated over 1 million conditions, including varying the length of the study, the size of the area examined, the number of removal events, the capture rates, and the area impacted by removal efforts. Our estimates were unbiased (within 10% of truth) 81% of the time and were correlated with truth 91% of the time. This method performs well overall and, in particular, at monitoring trends in abundances over time. We applied this method to removal data from Mingo National Wildlife Refuge in Missouri from December 2015 to September 2019, where the management objective is elimination. Populations of feral swine on Mingo NWR have fluctuated over time but showed marked declines in the last 3–6 months of the time series corresponding to increased removal pressure. Our approach allows for the estimation of population growth across time (from both births and immigration) and therefore, provides a target removal rate (above that of the population growth) to ensure the population will decline. In Mingo NWR, the target monthly removal rate is 18% to cause a population decline. Our method provides advancement over traditional removal modeling approaches because it can be applied to evaluate management programs that use a broad range of removal techniques concurrently and whose management effort and spatial coverage vary across time

    Psychometric Properties of the Hoarding Rating Scale-Interview

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    The present study tested the psychometric properties of an expanded version of the Hoarding Rating Scale (HRS-I), a semistructured interview for hoarding disorder (HD). Eighty-seven adults with HD and 44 healthy control (HC) participants were assessed using the HRS-I and completed a battery of self-report measures of HD severity, negative affect, and functional impairment. All interviews were audio recorded. From the HD participants, 21 were randomly selected for inter-rater reliability (IRR) analysis and 11 for test-retest reliability (TRR) analysis. The HRS-I showed excellent internal consistency (α = 0.87). IRR and TRR in the HD sample were good (intra-class coefficients = 0.81 and 0.85, respectively). HRS-I scores correlated strongly with scores on the self-report Saving Inventory-Revised (SI-R); partial correlations indicated that the HRS-I clutter, difficulty discarding, and acquiring items correlated significantly and at least moderately with corresponding SI-R subscales, when controlling for the other SI-R subscales. The HD group scored significantly higher on all items than did the HC group, with large effect sizes (d = 1.28–6.58). ROC analysis showed excellent sensitivity (1.00) and specificity (1.00) for distinguishing the HD and HC groups with a cutoff score of 11. Results and limitations are discussed in light of prior research

    A Cepheid Distance to NGC 4603 in Centaurus

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    In an attempt to use Cepheid variables to determine the distance to the Centaurus cluster, we have obtained images of NGC 4603 with the Hubble Space Telescope on 9 epochs using WFPC2 and the F555W and F814W filters. This galaxy has been suggested to lie within the ``Cen30'' portion of the cluster and is the most distant object for which this method has been attempted. Previous distance estimates for Cen30 have varied significantly and some have presented disagreements with the peculiar velocity predicted from redshift surveys, motivating this investigation. Using our observations, we have found 61 candidate Cepheid variable stars; however, a significant fraction of these candidates are likely to be nonvariable stars whose magnitude measurement errors happen to fit a Cepheid light curve of significant amplitude for some choice of period and phase. Through a maximum likelihood technique, we determine that we have observed 43 +/- 7 real Cepheids and that NGC 4603 has a distance modulus of 32.61 +0.11/-0.10 (random, 1 sigma) +0.24/-0.25 (systematic, adding in quadrature), corresponding to a distance of 33.3 Mpc. This is consistent with a number of recent estimates of the distance to NGC 4603 or Cen30 and implies a small peculiar velocity consistent with predictions from the IRAS 1.2 Jy redshift survey if the galaxy lies in the foreground of the cluster.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. 17 pages with 17 embedded figures and 3 tables using emulateapj.sty. Additional figures and images may be obtained from http://astro.berkeley.edu/~marc/n4603
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