Discourses of change ownership in higher education

PURPOSE - This paper demonstrates how the positioning of self and others affects change in higher education. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH - The discourse of various educators was collected during various interviews and discussion groups. A positioning theory framework was used to analyse the data and derive conclusions. FINDINGS - It is shown that if individuals are understood in terms of their agendas in relation to the organisational context that they can be better led. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS - The quantity and quality of data available has limited the integrity of conclusions drawn from this paper. Further research is proposed that will provide a more robust understanding. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS - An approach to understand how to deal with various stakeholders is presented for leaders. There is a need to deal with each person as an individual depending on how their personal agendas influence their priorities. ORIGINALITY/VALUE - This paper introduces a social constructionist perspective to leading academics

Using positioning theory to understand how senior managers deal with sustainability

Social pressure for sustainability has become a significant factor in Australian business. Made popular by a variety of diverse social movements that employ various tactics, sustainability is increasingly being debated in boardrooms and work areas of both large and small businesses. In this research, sustainability issues are treated as a set of a wider range of obligatory and externally imposed (OEI) issues that are increasingly confronting contemporary business. Of interest to this research is how senior managers deal with sustainability issues. While some businesses excel in dealing with OEI issues, others prevaricate. This research focuses on those businesses that appear to excel in resolving sustainability issues to explore how senior managers deal with sustainability issues. Such understanding is essential for contemporary practising senior managers, as it provides guidance for management behaviour that will enable sustainability and other OEI issues to be dealt with. The author's effort to understand how senior managers deal with sustainability issues has led to the first business context application of Harré's positioning theory. A social constructionist approach, positioning theory is concerned with ordinary conversations, and presumes that these are the building blocks of all other discursive phenomena. The resulting theory builds on positioning theory and provides a point of departure to conduct related research on other organizations that excel in dealing with OEI issues and those that prevaricate. With positioning theory it has been shown that, in dealing with sustainability issues, senior managers engage in a range of positioning of themselves and others. In doing so, power and knowledge have been considered in the light of Foucault's unique and penetrating concepts. This has led to the proposed augmentation of positioning theory to include a concept of social flux, which is put forward as an indication of social order or culture. Through this development, it has shown how senior managers confront opposition and reinforce support to enable them to achieve and preserve sustainability objectives. In practical terms, senior managers alter four components of the social order to align the culture with the issues that need to be dealt with. These components - rights, duties, morals and actions - are parameters that senior managers tune or level when they deal with sustainability issues. When the social order is appropriately tuned or levelled, it is aligned with the issues that need to be dealt with. That alignment enables issues to be resolved in a way appropriate for the organization

Digitally Continuous Multivalued Functions, Morphological Operations and Thinning Algorithms

In a recent paper (Escribano et al. in Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4992, pp. 81–92, 2008) we have introduced a notion of continuity in digital spaces which extends the usual notion of digital continuity. Our approach, which uses multivalued functions, provides a better framework to define topological notions, like retractions, in a far more realistic way than by using just single-valued digitally continuous functions. In this work we develop properties of this family of continuous functions, now concentrating on morphological operations and thinning algorithms. We show that our notion of continuity provides a suitable framework for the basic operations in mathematical morphology: erosion, dilation, closing, and opening. On the other hand, concerning thinning algorithms, we give conditions under which the existence of a retraction F:X⟶X∖D guarantees that D is deletable. The converse is not true, in general, although it is in certain particular important cases which are at the basis of many thinning algorithms

Promoting tau secretion and propagation by hyperactive p300/CBP via autophagy-lysosomal pathway in tauopathy.

BackgroundThe trans-neuronal propagation of tau has been implicated in the progression of tau-mediated neurodegeneration. There is critical knowledge gap in understanding how tau is released and transmitted, and how that is dysregulated in diseases. Previously, we reported that lysine acetyltransferase p300/CBP acetylates tau and regulates its degradation and toxicity. However, whether p300/CBP is involved in regulation of tau secretion and propagation is unknown.MethodWe investigated the relationship between p300/CBP activity, the autophagy-lysosomal pathway (ALP) and tau secretion in mouse models of tauopathy and in cultured rodent and human neurons. Through a high-through-put compound screen, we identified a new p300 inhibitor that promotes autophagic flux and reduces tau secretion. Using fibril-induced tau spreading models in vitro and in vivo, we examined how p300/CBP regulates tau propagation.ResultsIncreased p300/CBP activity was associated with aberrant accumulation of ALP markers in a tau transgenic mouse model. p300/CBP hyperactivation blocked autophagic flux and increased tau secretion in neurons. Conversely, inhibiting p300/CBP promoted autophagic flux, reduced tau secretion, and reduced tau propagation in fibril-induced tau spreading models in vitro and in vivo.ConclusionsWe report that p300/CBP, a lysine acetyltransferase aberrantly activated in tauopathies, causes impairment in ALP, leading to excess tau secretion. This effect, together with increased intracellular tau accumulation, contributes to enhanced spreading of tau. Our findings suggest that inhibition of p300/CBP as a novel approach to correct ALP dysfunction and block disease progression in tauopathy

Brain MR Spectroscopy Changes Precede Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration Phenoconversion in Mapt Mutation Carriers.

Background and purposeThe objective of this study was to longitudinally investigate the trajectory of change in 1 H MRS measurements in asymptomatic MAPT mutation carriers who became symptomatic during follow-up, and to determine the time at which the neurochemical alterations accelerated during disease progression.MethodsWe identified eight MAPT mutations carriers who transitioned from asymptomatic to symptomatic disease during follow-up. All participants were longitudinally followed with an average of 7.75 years (range 4-11 years) and underwent two or more single voxel 1 H MRS examinations from the posterior cingulate voxel, with a total of 60 examinations. The rate of longitudinal change for each metabolite was estimated using linear mixed models. A flex point model was used to estimate the flex time point of the change in slope.ResultsThe decrease in the NAA/mI ratio accelerated 2.09 years prior to symptom onset, and continued to decline. A similar trajectory was observed in the presumed glial marker mI/Cr ratio accelerating 1.86 years prior to symptom onset.ConclusionsOur findings support the potential use of longitudinal 1 H MRS for monitoring the neurodegenerative progression in MAPT mutation carriers starting from the asymptomatic stage

Foreign Wars and Domestic Prejudice: How Media Exposure to the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict Predicts Ethnic Stereotyping by Jewish and Arab American Adolescents

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/93529/1/jora785.pd

Contexts of diffusion: Adoption of research synthesis in Social Work and Women's Studies

Texts reveal the subjects of interest in research fields, and the values, beliefs, and practices of researchers. In this study, texts are examined through bibliometric mapping and topic modeling to provide a birds eye view of the social dynamics associated with the diffusion of research synthesis methods in the contexts of Social Work and Women's Studies. Research synthesis texts are especially revealing because the methods, which include meta-analysis and systematic review, are reliant on the availability of past research and data, sometimes idealized as objective, egalitarian approaches to research evaluation, fundamentally tied to past research practices, and performed with the goal informing future research and practice. This study highlights the co-influence of past and subsequent research within research fields; illustrates dynamics of the diffusion process; and provides insight into the cultural contexts of research in Social Work and Women's Studies. This study suggests the potential to further develop bibliometric mapping and topic modeling techniques to inform research problem selection and resource allocation.Comment: To appear in proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction (SBP2014

Criteria for the diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration

Current criteria for the clinical diagnosis of pathologically confirmed corticobasal degeneration (CBD) no longer reflect the expanding understanding of this disease and its clinicopathologic correlations. An international consortium of behavioral neurology, neuropsychology, and movement disorders specialists developed new criteria based on consensus and a systematic literature review. Clinical diagnoses (early or late) were identified for 267 nonoverlapping pathologically confirmed CBD cases from published reports and brain banks. Combined with consensus, 4 CBD phenotypes emerged: corticobasal syndrome (CBS), frontal behavioral-spatial syndrome (FBS), nonfluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia (naPPA), and progressive supranuclear palsy syndrome (PSPS). Clinical features of CBD cases were extracted from descriptions of 209 brain bank and published patients, providing a comprehensive description of CBD and correcting common misconceptions. Clinical CBD phenotypes and features were combined to create 2 sets of criteria: more specific clinical research criteria for probable CBD and broader criteria for possible CBD that are more inclusive but have a higher chance to detect other tau-based pathologies. Probable CBD criteria require insidious onset and gradual progression for at least 1 year, age at onset ≥50 years, no similar family history or known tau mutations, and a clinical phenotype of probable CBS or either FBS or naPPA with at least 1 CBS feature. The possible CBD category uses similar criteria but has no restrictions on age or family history, allows tau mutations, permits less rigorous phenotype fulfillment, and includes a PSPS phenotype. Future validation and refinement of the proposed criteria are needed