Pesticide exposure and sprayer design: ergonomics evaluation to reduce pesticide exposure

Plant protection products are used in agriculture to improve yields, but this use can cause contamination of the environment and is also likely to have adverse short and long term effects on agricultural workers. This poster describes a systems approach to reducing the risk of operator exposure to plant protection products through the introduction of ergonomics to the design process of large agricultural sprayers.     

Ethnic studies,citizenship education,and the public good

Since the 1990s, ethnic studies and other components of multicultural education have been criticized by neo-conservative and assimilationist scholars who maintain that school diversity initiatives weaken national identity and fail to help students attain the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to function effectively in the national mainstream culture. The banning of ethnic studies courses in the Tucson (Arizona) Unified School District in the USA was a widely publicized manifestation of the neo-conservative response to multicultural school initiatives. This article describes neo-conservative critiques of ethnic studies, and argues that ethnic studies is an important component of US history that is required to help students become effective and thoughtful citizens in a democratic nation and global world.     

Motivating Action and Maintaining Change: The Time‐Varying Role of Homework Following a Brief Couples' Intervention

Studies regarding the effectiveness of homework assignments in cognitive‐behavioral treatments have demonstrated mixed results. This study investigated predictors of compliance with homework recommendations and the time‐varying relationship of recommendation completion with treatment response in a brief couples' intervention (N = 108). More satisfied couples and couples with more motivation to change completed more recommendations, whereas couples with children completed fewer. The association between recommendation completion and treatment response varied with the passage of time, with the strongest effect observed 6 months after the intervention, but no discernible differences at 1 year postintervention. Couples that completed more recommendations experienced more rapid treatment gains, but even those couples doing substantially fewer recommendations ultimately realized equivalent treatment effects, although they progressed more slowly. Implications are discussed.     

The Process of Personal Transformation for Adolescents Practicing Mindfulness Skills in an Alternative School Setting

This qualitative study examined the experiences of alternative school students as they participated in a mindfulness skills program. A 7-month school-based mindfulness skills program was integrated into the Grade 10 curriculum for high school students (N = 19; 10 boys and 9 girls, ages 15–17). Students engaged in mindfulness practices twice weekly during class time. Students practiced breath awareness, and seated, walking, and lying mindfulness meditation during the course of the program. Students completed initial and final questionnaires about their experiences as well as written journal entries based on their experiences in the program. At the completion of the program, 14 of the 19 program completers were interviewed (6 boys and 8 girls). Data analysis yielded two broad areas of perceived benefits of participation in the mindfulness skills program: intrapersonal benefits and interpersonal benefits. Intrapersonal benefits included themes of self-awareness and self-regulation (including cognition, emotions, and behavior). Interpersonal benefits included themes of building relationships (with peers, family members, and teachers) and learning to trust. These findings may be useful when planning school-based mindfulness programs and may serve as a guide for researchers studying mindfulness practices for youth.     

Using a Person-Centered Approach to Examine the Impact of Homelessness on School Absences

Brought on by increasing levels of economic vulnerability, homelessness is a pressing issue for our schools. Homeless students often miss an inordinate amount of school days and are thought to fall at the farthest end of a “continuum of poverty.” Theoretically they have worse outcomes than their peers, though the past 20 years of literature have found inconsistencies in these comparisons. Thus the literature suggests analysis to compare types of students based on outcomes rather than demographic categorizations, a person-centered approach. Using this approach, a comparison of the number of absences for homeless students and their housed peers is made through quantile analysis. Using school administrative data collected over one school year for an entire school district we found that homeless students as an aggregate do not miss significantly more days of school than their poorest peers. However, we found homelessness and poverty dramatically increase the number of absences for children who are in the higher percentiles of absences meaning homelessness has a greater impact on those who miss more days of school in general compared to regular attendees. Findings from this study indicate that homelessness may exacerbate problems rather than cause them. Implications for practice are discussed and directions for future study are proposed.     

A KNOWLEDGE-BASED DSS FOR MANAGERIAL PROBLEM DIAGNOSIS

A knowledge-based system supporting managerial problem diagnosis is described. The system provides the capability to monitor values of selected variables for problem situations. When problems are located, a list of problem symptoms is delivered to a problem processor for structuring and diagnosis. Problem structuring is based on a combination of concepts from expert systems and structural modeling. User assertions about cause-effect relationships between pairs of variables are maintained in a semantic network. Problem diagnosis uses the relationships in the semantic network to construct causation trees, the branches of which represent potential explanations of the problem symptoms. Mathematical models are constructed based on causation-tree branches, and values from the data base are used to test whether the model confirms the diagnosis. If so, the source of the problem has been located and it is then up to the user to resolve the problem. If the model fails to explain the problem, the model apparently is deficient and the user may perform “what if…” type scenarios in attempts to improve the model and search for problem causes. Realistic applications in the accounting and health care areas are discussed.     

Education CREATIVE THINKING AND INNOVATIVE EDUCATION IN THE DECISION SCIENCES

Creative problem solving is seldom addressed directly in the decision sciences literature. The first half of this paper reviews current thinking about creativity and its educational importance. The remainder addresses creative problem-solving processes and, in particular, the process developed by Parnes, Noller and Biondi [24] and Osborn [23]. This process has been integrated into an OR/MS problem-solving course which is described. Conclusions and implications for decision sciences education and practice in general are discussed.     

Do military veteran and civilian students function differently in college?

Objective: The authors sought to assess military veterans' functioning in college by comparing their experience with that of civilian students. Participants: The study, conducted from April 2012 to February 2013, included 445 civilian and 61 student service member/veteran (SSM/V) undergraduates, drawn from a community college and two 4-year Catholic colleges, in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. Methods: Participants completed anonymous online surveys. Six areas of functioning in transition to college were examined: Health, Fitting In, Emotional Adjustment, Productivity, Perceived Career Support, and Social Engagement. Results: Students, both SSM/V and civilian, with past exposure to a potentially traumatic event fit in worse than students without such exposure. Past exposure to trauma was associated with poorer emotional adjustment in civilian students, but not in SSM/V. Conclusions: Implications of results were discussed.     

Modeling Correlated Discrete Uncertainties in Event Trees with Copulas

Modeling the dependence between uncertainties in decision and risk analyses is an important part of the problem structuring process. We focus on situations where correlated uncertainties are discrete, and extend the concept of the copula‐based approach for modeling correlated continuous uncertainties to the representation of correlated discrete uncertainties. This approach reduces the required number of probability assessments significantly compared to approaches requiring direct estimates of conditional probabilities. It also allows the use of multiple dependence measures, including product moment correlation, rank order correlation and tail dependence, and parametric families of copulas such as normal copulas, t‐copulas, and Archimedean copulas. This approach can be extended to model the dependence between discrete and continuous uncertainties in the same event tree.