The hybrid and dualistic identity of full-time non-tenure-track faculty

Colleges and universities rely on full-time non-tenure-track (FTNT) faculty to achieve their teaching, research, and service missions. These faculty are deemed both symptomatic of and partly responsible for academe's shortcomings. The ascriptions, however, are made with little attention to the faculty themselves or to their consequences for FTNT faculty. Through analysis of interview data of university faculty, the authors present and explain FTNT faculty self-representations of professional and occupational identity. Assumptions drawn from institutional and professional theory contextualize the research, and narrative analysis infuses the application of the framework of cultural identity theory. These FTNT faculty are found to possess hybrid and dualistic identities. Their work and roles are a hybrid and contain some elements of a profession and some of a "job." Their identity is dualistic because as teachers, they express satisfaction, whereas as members of the professoriate, they articulate restricted self-determination and self-esteem. This troubled and indistinct view of self-as-professional is problematic both for FTNT faculty as they go about their daily work and for their institutions, which are in no small part responsible for the uncertain conditions and identities of FTNT faculty. © 2011 SAGE Publications

State of the technique on surge protection of telecommunication installations with surge diverters

Surge protection in communication systems by diverter

Visual cognition during real social interaction

Copyright @ 2012 The Authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and 85 reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The article was made available through the Brunel University Open Access Publishing Fund.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Laboratory studies of social visual cognition often simulate the critical aspects of joint attention by having participants interact with a computer-generated avatar. Recently, there has been a movement toward examining these processes during authentic social interaction. In this review, we will focus on attention to faces, attentional misdirection, and a phenomenon we have termed social inhibition of return (Social IOR), that have revealed aspects of social cognition that were hitherto unknown. We attribute these discoveries to the use of paradigms that allow for more realistic social interactions to take place. We also point to an area that has begun to attract a considerable amount of interest—that of Theory of Mind (ToM) and automatic perspective taking—and suggest that this too might benefit from adopting a similar approach

Enhancing the performance of Xanthan gum in water-based mud systems using an environmentally friendly biopolymer

Xanthan gum is commonly used in drilling fluids to provide viscosity, solid suspension, and fluid-loss control. However, it is sensitive to high temperatures and not tolerant of field contaminants. This paper presents an experimental study on the effects of an eco-friendly biopolymer (diutan gum) on xanthan gum (XC) in a water-based bentonite mud. Laboratory experiments were carried out for different compositions of the biopolymers in water-based bentonite muds formulated without salt and in water-based bentonite muds containing sodium chloride (NaCl). The rheological properties of the water-based bentonite muds formulated with XC (2 Ibm) and those of the water-based bentonite muds prepared using XC (1Ibm) and diutan gum (1Ibm) were measured using Model 1100 viscometer after aging at 25 °C, 100 °C, and 120 °C for 16 h. The API fluid loss and filter cake of the mud formulations were measured using HTHP filter press. The properties of the water-based bentonite muds containing only XC were compared with those of the water-based bentonite muds containing XC and diutan gum. Presented results show that combining diutan gum and xanthan gum in a ratio of 1:1 in a water-based bentonite mud enhances its performance with respect to fluid properties—apparent viscosity, gel strength, yield points, YP/PV ratio, LSRV, n, and K. The fluid formulations also showed favorable mud cake building characteristics. Experimental data also indicate a 16%, 19%, and 34% reduction in API fluid loss values for the water-based benitoite muds containing XC in the presence of diutan gum after aging at 25 °C, 100 °C, and 120 °C for 16 h, respectively. Experimental results also show that the water-based benitoite mud containing XC and diutan gum would cause less formation damage and was tolerant of contamination with a monovalent cation (Na+). The synergy of xanthan gum and diutan gum can, therefore, improve the performance of water-based drilling fluids

An on-line solid phase extraction procedure for the routine quantification of urinary methylmalonic acid by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry

Background: The goal of this study was to develop and to validate an improved isotope-dilution-liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method for the quantification of methylmalonic acid (MMA) in urine. Methods: A previously described sample preparation protocol requires two solvent extraction steps, including evaporation. The first extraction is to extract the analyte from the sample, and second occurs following derivatization of the extract. In the method described here, the second evaporation step was substituted by on-line solid phase extraction employing column-switching and a permanent co-polymer based extraction cartridge. A standard validation protocol was applied to investigate the performance of the method. Results: The method was found to be linear in the clinically relevant range of concentrations (6-100 mu mol/L). Total coefficients of variation were below 10% and inaccuracy was <10% for quality control samples at three concentrations. Conclusions: By omitting one evaporation step, the semi-automated method described in this article enables for more convenient work-flow in the quantification of urinary MMA compared to the previous protocol. This is of relevance for MMA measurement in the routine clinical laboratory setting. Validation demonstrated acceptable analytical performance. Clin Chem Lab Med 2010;48:1647-50

Engineering Design of phased array EPI using TDM

published_or_final_versio