Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Study of Organizational Trust and Related Variables among Faculty Members at HBCUs.

Trust in the workplace has been linked to higher levels of organizational performance and competitiveness. The imperative of variants of trust among a spectrum of institutional types, including colleges and universities, has been deemed to be considered essential for organizational effectiveness, stability and continuity. One variant, organizational trust, may be a particularly important factor during periods of exigency where exogenous forces may function to punctuate organizational equilibrium. This study focuses on organizational trust and associated variables (empowerment, resistance to change, support for innovation, interpersonal conflict, and demographics) as perceived by faculty in the work environment of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). HBCUs and their faculties have received minor attention in terms of research related to the focal variables in this study. The study depended on an existing database that included perceived responses of faculty at HBCUs to structured items included in survey measures. Selected variables included in the study model were considered. Some 3,070 faculty members working in 73 HBCUs throughout the United States provided the data included in this study. Secondary analyses revealed that higher levels of empowerment, higher levels of support for innovation, and lower levels of interpersonal conflict were associated with higher levels of organizational trust. The relationship between perceptions of empowerment and organizational trust, moreover, was influenced significantly by levels of resistance to change and support for innovation. Implementable strategies associated with study findings were commended for initiatives designed to strengthen organizational trust in the
Mulling over Massachusetts: Health Insurance Mandates and Entrepreneurs

The author provides preliminary and provocative results regarding the impact of health insurance mandates on the propensity of entrepreneurs to start new organizations. In keeping with a well–observed propensity for individuals to adjust their economic calculations in anticipation of future costs/benefits, the evidence suggests that when confronted with such mandates, potential entrepreneurs may either abandon entrepreneurial ambitions or seek to minimize mandate costs through jurisdictional arbitrage with appreciable implications for state and national level approaches to health care, health insurance provision, and workers.
Complete Genome Sequences of Six Legionella pneumophila Isolates from Two Collocated Outbreaks of Legionnaires’ Disease in 2005 and 2008 in Sarpsborg/Fredrikstad, Norway

ABSTRACT Here, we report the complete genome sequences of Legionella pneumophila isolates from two collocated outbreaks of Legionnaires' disease in 2005 and 2008 in Sarpsborg/Fredrikstad, Norway. One clinical and two environmental isolates were sequenced from each outbreak. The genome of all six isolates consisted of a 3.36 Mb-chromosome, while the 2005 genomes featured an additional 68 kb-episome sharing high sequence similarity with the L. pneumophila Lens plasmid. All six genomes contained multiple mobile genetic elements including novel combinations of type-IVA secretion systems. A comparative genomics study will be launched to resolve the genetic relationship between the L. pneumophila isolates.
Checking Out Service: Evaluating Excellence, HRM and TQM in Retailing

We evaluate a number of the claims made in the debate between the prescriptive and critical literature that surrounds `excellence', with a particular focus on human resource and quality management. The critical literature contains two positions, broadly a traditional control perspective and the other concerned with the structuring of meaning. The empirical basis of the paper is an investigation of an HRM and quality initiative in a leading supermarket company. The initiative embodies many of the prescriptions of the gurus of excellence. We present both qualitative and quantitative data collected from shopfloor and managerial staff. Our findings lend little support to the traditional criticism that, if management objectives are realised, they are achieved through some combination of sham empowerment, work intensification and increased surveillance. Our evidence lends more support to the optimistic view that modern techniques of quality and human resource management can benefit employees. We suggest that the alternative concern with the way meanings are constructed has more plausibility, because the new managerial discourse of quality has affected the attitudes of a significant number of employees towards customer service. However, there was considerable variation in how employees received the programme's message and thus its effects are by no means uniform. Moreover, we encounter an unanticipated and previously unremarked consequence of managerial discourses, that employees use these as resources in their struggles with managers in order to bring managers into line with workforce expectations.
Knowledge management practice in Scottish law firms

Law firms, as part of the professional services sector, are increasingly engaged in strategic thinking about business growth and development. The management of partners, staff and their knowledge is critical to this strategic development. This study of a sample of Scottish law firms engaged in commercial and corporate law finds that organisations are at different stages of progress, and that change has focused more on technical solutions than on organisational and HR issues. Based on evidence from partners and management, and on attitude data from salaried staff, the article suggests that, although the traditional professional firm's interest in building and leveraging its human capital is still present, the underlying social and cultural processes involving motivation, sharing of experiences, coaching and mentoring are relatively underdeveloped. The implications for HR strategy and practice, and for the role of the HR manager, are considered.
Interviews: Linking Leadership Theory to Practice.

Leadership educators use various tools to enable their students to learn about leadership. This article describes the assignment Interview with a Leader which the authors have incorporated into several different leadership courses. Grounded in constructivist and social learning theories, the authors have found this assignment to be particularly effective as a strategy for helping students make meaning of the complexities and application of leadership. Furthermore, students found the assignment to be especially helpful for connecting leadership theory to practice.
Subjective insecurity and the role of institutions

The issue of social insecurity is high on the public and scientific agenda. Most research, however, looks at objective forms of insecurity like growing labour market volatilities or atypical employment. Less has been done with regard to the way people perceive these changes and the role of institutions therein. While recent studies have highlighted the relatively weak role of institutions in explaining different levels of subjective insecurity, they were limited in their understanding in the institutions–security interplay. This special issue aims to understand how institutions generate and moderate the outcomes of subjective insecurity, as well as to overcome some of the methodological limitations of previous studies. The introduction provides a state-of-the-art literature review and unfolds the research question addressed in the special issue. It concludes with some thoughts for future research in the field of social insecurity and institutions.
Death anxiety (Thanatophobia) among drug dependents in an Arabic psychiatric hospital

Aim: The primary aim of this study was, for the first time to our knowledge, to examine the level of death anxiety (thanatophobia) in drug dependents attending the outpatient clinic in a psychiatric hospital and to examine the relationship of demographic variables to death anxiety. Method: Eighty-five patients were recruited from outpatient psychiatric attendees at the psychiatric hospital, Kingdom of Bahrain. The death anxiety scale was administered to assess death anxiety, and a clinical psychiatric interview was used to assess psychopathology. Results: The mean age of the sample was 36.8 years (SD = 8.8). All subjects who participated in the study were Arabic males; the majority of them were primary school (i.e. first 5 years of education or schooling) educated (n = 57; 67%) and single (n = 48; 56.5%). The total mean of death anxiety score of the drug abusers was high (3.52±.95). One-way ANOVA showed that there was no significant difference among the scores the drug dependents received on the death anxiety scale related to different groups of age, education, type of the drug used, or the number of times of taking drugs per day. However, there was a significant difference in the level of control of use, marital status, duration of use, cigarettes smoking, and level of religiosity. Conclusion: The results of this study indicate that the level of death anxiety is high, in general, among drug abusers and that being divorced, not actively practicing a religious faith, having at least 1–10 years or more than 20 years history of drug abuse, and smoking at least 20 or more cigarettes per day significantly increases the level of death anxiety.
Fractional (Co)integration and Governing Party Support in Britain

Recent developments in the analysis of long-memoried processes provide important leverage for analysing time-series variables of interest to political scientists. This article provides an accessible exposition of these methods and illustrates their utility for addressing protracted controversies regarding the political economy of party support in Britain. Estimates of the fractionally differencing parameter, d, reveal that governing party support, prime ministerial approval and economic evaluations are long-memoried and non-stationary, and that governing party support and prime ministerial approval are fractionally cointegrated. Pace conventional wisdom that party leader images matter little, if at all, analyses of multivariate fractional error correction models show that prime ministerial approval has important short-run and long-run effects on party support. Prospective and retrospective personal economic evaluations are influential but, contrary to a longstanding claim, national economic evaluations are not significant. The article concludes by suggesting that individual-level heterogeneity is a likely source of the observed aggregate-level fractional integration in governing party support and its determinants. Specifying parsimonious models that incorporate theoretically meaningful heterogeneity is a challenging topic for future research.
Ben Graham’s NCAV (Net Current Asset Value) Technique in the 21st Century

Common convention insists that investors must increase their risk tolerance in order to increase their expected return. Yet, there appears to be an exception. Benjamin Graham’s NCAV technique achieved an annualized geometric return of 24.7% from 2003 to 2010 that was unexplainable by either the capital asset pricing model or the Fama-French-Carhart model. In fact, by comparing the incidence and magnitude of negative returns among Graham’s method and the indexes, the NCAV appears to act as a quasi put option, protecting investors from losses. The average firm capitalization of $173 million and average sample size of 96 stocks, however, suggest that the method has limited applicability for large investment firms. Fortunately, their absence leaves the anomaly uncorrected and exploitable by the rest of us.
MANAGERIAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH COMPANY PERFORMANCE‐PART II. A CONTINGENCY ANALYSIS

In Part I of this paper we examined the possibility that certain managerial and organizational characteristics were associated with company performance under a wide range of operating conditions. Part II now turns to an alternative theory of performance which has attracted more attention in recent years. This is contingency theory, which enable a company to cope better with its particular operating conditions. In other words, the factors associated with high performance are expected to vary along with differences in a company's context‐especially with differences in its environment, size and technology.
A zero sum game? Eliminating course repetition and its effects on arts education

A ZERO SUM GAME? ELIMINATING COURSE REPETITION AND ITS EFFECTS ON ARTS EDUCATION By Ting-Pi Joyce Carrigan In 2011, with ongoing concerns over state budget shortfalls and the increasing educational cost structure, California state legislators focused their attention on measures that could lead to access, added productivity, and value in order to sustain the current educational system. One of the recommendations provided by the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) was to eliminate state support for course repetition in activity classes. In 2012, the Board of Governors (BOG) adopted the changes to Title 5 of the California Code of Regulations to limit the apportionment a community college district could collect for student attendance in credit courses that are related in content. This limitation on apportionment was intended to specifically limit student enrollment in active participatory courses such as those in the visual and performing arts. This qualitative interview study used the Discipline-Based Art Education framework to bring forth the experiences of 13 community college visual and performing arts (VAPA) instructors. The purpose of the study was to understand how VAPA instructors experienced the elimination of course repetition, how they reconciled the requirements of their discipline with the state educational policy, and how these changes influence the teaching and promotion of access to arts learning. 1 Findings showed little uniformity and commonality in the approach participants took to reconcile the pedagogical practices of their discipline with the state-initiated curricular changes. The findings also indicated that VAPA instructors had very different perceptions of their students’ developmental levels. Consequently, their approach at making changes to their curricula varied significantly. Furthermore, all VAPA instructors in the study felt strongly that skill building was inherent to the process of arts learning and making. With the loss of arts courses due to recent budget cuts coupled with the loss of course repetition, VAPA instructors argued that students would find the pursuit of arts studies to be cursory and insignificant, and many would likely choose simply to give up. This is a critical time to bring to the forefront discussions on the place arts education has in the community colleges.
Social Media Tools in the Leadership Classroom: Students' Perceptions of Use

Social media is becoming more prevalent in the higher education classroom. As part of an ongoing study, the Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communications at Texas A&M University surveyed leadership students about their perceptions of their level of comfort and frequency of use of social media tools and the advantages and disadvantages that these students perceived when social media was used in the leadership classroom. A total of 79 students were surveyed in two upper level leadership courses. Facebook was the social media tool students were most comfortable with and used most frequently. Journal of Leadership Education Volume 12, Issue 1 – Winter 2013 35 Advantages included social media helping increase quality and efficiency of communication between students and the instructor, social media as a technological norm, access to class information, ease of collaboration, and stronger social connections between classmates. Disadvantages revolved around issues of use of and access to social media.
Chinese Economy and Excess Liquidity

This paper considers five indicators of excess liquidity to verify its existence in China. Based on the analysis, we argue that the People's Bank of China and other banks in China are responsible for the excess liquidity in China. Other factors, such as the excess savings resulting from the poor social security network, the asset bubble and the foreign exchange system, fuel banks with abundant liquidity. To tackle the problem of excess liquidity and direct capital into productive sectors, the traditional use of monetary policy alone is not sufficient. The semi-administrative tool window guidance and other macroeconomic control methods are required.
Game Sense as a model for delivering quality teaching in physical education

As a well-developed indicator of high-quality teaching in any subject area we use the New South Wales (NSW) Quality Teaching Framework (QTF) in this article to identify what might constitute quality teaching in physical education and to suggest the extent to which Game Sense pedagogy can be seen to meet the expectations of the NSW QTF. We identify and discuss the pedagogical features of Game Sense that our examination suggests can provide quality teaching and learning to make suggestions about how this could inform the provision of high-quality teaching across the practical curriculum.
Filling the Gap: Simulation-based Crisis Resource Management Training for Emergency Medicine Residents

Introduction In today’s team-oriented healthcare environment, high-quality patient care requires physicians to possess not only medical knowledge and technical skills but also crisis resource management (CRM) skills. In emergency medicine (EM), the high acuity and dynamic environment makes CRM skills of physicians particularly critical to healthcare team success. The Accreditation Council of Graduate Medicine Education Core Competencies that guide residency program curriculums include CRM skills; however, EM residency programs are not given specific instructions as to how to teach these skills to their trainees. This article describes a simulation-based CRM course designed specifically for novice EM residents. Methods The CRM course includes an introductory didactic presentation followed by a series of simulation scenarios and structured debriefs. The course is designed to use observational learning within simulation education to decrease the time and resources required for implementation. To assess the effectiveness in improving team CRM skills, two independent raters use a validated CRM global rating scale to measure the CRM skills displayed by teams of EM interns in a pretest and posttest during the course. Results The CRM course improved leadership, problem solving, communication, situational awareness, teamwork, resource utilization and overall CRM skills displayed by teams of EM interns. While the improvement from pretest to posttest did not reach statistical significance for this pilot study, the large effect sizes suggest that statistical significance may be achieved with a larger sample size. Conclusion This course can feasibly be incorporated into existing EM residency curriculums to provide EM trainees with basic CRM skills required of successful emergency physicians. We believe integrating CRM training early into existing EM education encourages continued deliberate practice, discussion, and improvement of essential CRM skills.
Provisional chapter Maize Silage as Substrate for Biogas Production

The presented work studies the possibilities of using maize silage for biogas production in laboratory as well as in full-scale conditions. From the results of long-term operation of a mixed laboratory anaerobic reactor, it follows that processing of maize silage as a single substrate is an unstable process due to the low alkalinity of silage that has to be compensated by pH adjustment. Specific production of biogas was 0.655 m3/kg of volatile solids. Start-up of a full-scale anaerobic reactor of a biogas plant with the volume of 2450 m3 takes approximately 100 days. At the end of the start-up, the biogas plant reached the designed parameters—maize silage dose 6–7 t/d of total solids, the reactor load about 2.5 kg/(m3/d) of volatile solids, the biogas production of 4200 m3/d, electricity production of ca. 6600 kWh/d, and heat production of ca. 11,500 kWh/d. Processing of co-substrates in a biogas plant revealed both positive and negative effect on the biogas plant operation, for example, the meat and bone meal addition had a negative effect on the operation due to its high nitrogen content. Loading of crude glycerol (12.1% of the total volatile solids added) showed a positive and stabilizing effect.
Immunological Factors Relating to the Antitumor Effect of Temozolomide Chemoimmunotherapy in a Murine Glioma Model

ABSTRACT In this study, we investigated the potential of combined treatment with temozolomide (TMZ) chemotherapy and tumor antigen-pulsed dendritic cells (DCs) and the underlying immunological factors of TMZ chemoimmunotherapy with an intracranial GL26 glioma animal model. The combined treatment enhanced the tumor-specific immune responses and prolonged the survival more effectively than either single therapy in GL26 tumor-bearing animals. Apoptosis was induced in the tumors of the animals by the treatment with TMZ. Calreticulin (CRT) surface exposure was detected by immunofluorescence staining of TMZ-treated GL26 cells. TMZ chemotherapy increased tumor antigen cross-priming from tumor cells, leading to cross-priming of tumor antigen-specific CD4+ T cells and CD8+ T cells. This chemotherapy appeared to suppress the frequency of CD4+ CD25+ regulatory T cells (Treg). Moreover, this combined therapy resulted in an increase in the tumor infiltration of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. Collectively, the findings of this study provide evidence that the combination of TMZ chemotherapy and treatment with DC-based vaccines leads to the enhancement of antitumor immunity through increased tumor-specific immune responses via the cross-priming of apoptotic tumor cell death mediated by CRT exposure and, in part, the suppression of Treg. Therefore, CRT exposure, regulatory T cells, and cross-priming by TMZ chemotherapy may be immunological factors related to the enhancement of the antitumor effects of chemoimmunotherapy in an experimental brain tumor model.