Wielding a Double‐Edged Sword: The Use of Inquiries at Times of Crisis

Inquiries are often seen as a useful tool to deal with a crisis. By installing an inquiry, crisis managers show that they are in control of the crisis response. Moreover, they can hope that by the time the inquiry publishes its report a new topic has caught the attention of media and Parliament and reform measures do not need to be taken to end the crisis ( McConnell, 2003 ). Following a series of riots in British prisons in 1990, the Home Secretary installed an inquiry. By the time the Woolf inquiry published its report, media and Parliamentary attention for the British Prison Service was indeed dwindling. Normally, this low level of attention would provide political actors room to end the crisis with mere small measures and no need for reform. Yet in this case, and contrary to the dominant view on how inquiries influence the crisis management process, the Woolf inquiry provided an unexpected impetus to the crisis managing process, resulting in institutional reform of the British Prison Service (or to be more accurate, the Prison Service of England and Wales). This article shows how an inquiry can have an unexpected effect for political actors managing the crisis by introducing a new way of defining the problem at hand.     

Outsourcing - A legal perspective on contract critical success factors

This article provides a checklist of the critical success factors in achieving a successful outsourcing contract.     

Recipient's mood, relationship type, and helping.

We conducted two studies to examine how a potential helper is affected by having a communal orientation toward a relationship with a potential recipient and by the potential recipient's sadness. We hypothesized that (a) having a communal orientation would increase helping and that (b) people high in communal orientation, but not others, would respond to a potential recipient's sadness by increasing helping. These hypotheses were tested in two studies. In Study 1, individual differences in communal orientation toward relationships were measured by using a new communal orientation scale reported for the first time in this article. In Study 2, manipulations were used to lead subjects to desire either a communal or an exchange relationship with another person. In both studies, subjects were exposed to a sad person or to a person in a neutral mood whom they were given a chance to help. As hypothesized, in both studies communally oriented subjects helped the other significantly more than did others. Also as hypothesized, in both studies communally oriented subjects but not others, increased helping in response to the other person's sadness although this effect reached statistical significance only in the second study. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pragmatic modeling: toward a robust natural language interface

One of the most important ways in which an information-provider can assimilate an information-seeking dialogue is by inferring the underlying task-related plan motivating the information-seeker's queries. This paper presents a strategy for hypothesizing and tracking the changing task-level goals of an information-seeker and building a model of his task-related plan as the dialogue progresses.
Naturally occurring utterances are often imperfect. The information-provider often appears to use acquired knowledge about the information-seeker's underlying task-related plan to remedy many of the information-seeker's faulty utterances and enable the dialogue to continue without interruption. This paper presents a strategy for understanding one kind of defective utterance. Our approach relies on the information-seeker's inferred task-related plan as the primary mechanism for suggesting how an utterance should be understood, thereby considering only interpretations that are relevant to what the information-seeker is trying to accomplish. If multiple interpretations are suggested, relevance to the current focus of attention in the dialogue and similarity to the information-seeker's actual utterance are used to select the interpretation that is most likely to represent his intended meaning or satisfy his needs.     

Education and the "woman question."

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 39(1-2) of Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne (see record 2009-19704-001). The name of Kirstin Maxwell was inadvertently omitted from the list of students acknowledged at the end of die article. The corrected list is provided in the erratum.] Explores the "woman question," the 19th century debate about whether the rights and freedoms available to men should be extended to women, within the context of the post-secondary education system. Examples of the historical arguments in support of the exclusion of women are outlined followed by a more contemporary analysis of gender differences in graduate education with a particular focus on access, graduation rates and time to completion of graduate degrees. The "chilly climate" construct is presented as a possible explanation for the alleged gender differential on these latter 2 variables. According to this model, the structures and operation of academic institutions embody significant elements of systemic discrimination and micro-inequities which disadvantage women. A series of 6 studies are described by which various aspects of the chilly climate (i.e., mentoring and supervision, sexual harassment) are explored in terms of the effects on attrition and time to completion. Paradoxically, although the research reveals a failure of educational institutions to fully resolve the woman question, women continue to operate effectively under conditions of inequity. The paper concludes with speculations about the future constructions and deconstructions of this debate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fifteen-month follow-up of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder and psychological trauma.

The present study is a 15-month follow-up of the effects of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy on the functioning of 66 participants, 32 of whom were diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) prior to treatment. PTSD participants improved as much as those without the diagnosis, with both groups maintaining their gains at 15 months. At 15-month follow-up, the three 90-min sessions of EMDR previously administered (S. A. Wilson, L. A. Becker, & R. H. Tinker, 1995) produced an 84% reduction in PTSD diagnosis and a 68% reduction in PTSD symptoms. The average treatment effect size was 1.59; the average reliable change index was 3.37. Implications of the maintenance of EMDR treatment effects are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

High-Resolution cosmid mapping of the left arm of Saccharomyces cerevisiae chromosome XII; A first step towards an ordered sequencing approach

For the sequencing of the left arm of chromosome XII of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, we fine-mapped the entire 450 kb fragment between the ribosomal DNA (rDNA) and the left telomere. Total yeast DNA in agarose blocks was digested with I-PpoI, which exclusively cuts once in each repeat unit of the rDNA. The resulting fragment was isolated from pulsed-field gels, together with the equally sized chromosome IX. A cosmid library of some 30-fold chromosome coverage was generated from this material, with the cloning efficiency being around 20 000 clones per microgram genomic DNA. The chromosome XII and IX specific clones were identified by complementary hybridizations with the respective chromosomes. For the left arm of chromosome XII, a contiguous cosmid array (contig) with an average map resolution better than 9 kb was generated by clone hybridization procedures. The ordered library serves as a tool for the physical mapping of genetic markers. Also, a minimal set of 15 clones was selected that covers the entire fragment. This subset forms the basis for the generation of a template map of much higher resolution for a directed sequencing of the left arm of chromosome XII.     

Perspective taking promotes action understanding and learning.

[Retraction Notice: A retraction for this article was reported in Vol 34(5) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (see record 2008-13337-018). All authors retract this article. Co-author Tversky and co-author Hard believe that the research results cannot be relied upon; Sandra C. Lozano takes full responsibility for the need to retract this article.] People often learn actions by watching others. The authors propose and test the hypothesis that perspective taking promotes encoding a hierarchical representation of an actor's goals and subgoals-a key process for observational learning. Observers segmented videos of an object assembly task into coarse and fine action units. They described what happened in each unit from either the actor's, their own, or another observer's perspective and later performed the assembly task themselves. Participants who described the task from the actor's perspective encoded actions more hierarchically during observation and learned the task better. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Overexpression of human procarboxypeptidase A2 in Pichia pastoris and detailed characterization of its activation pathway

The cDNA of human procarboxypeptidase A2 has been overexpressed in the methylotrophic yeast Pichia pastoris and secreted into the culture medium by means of the alpha-mating factor signal sequence, yielding a major protein of identical size and N-terminal sequence as the wild-type form. Two other forms containing the proenzyme have also been overexpressed: one of them resulted from an incomplete processing of the signal peptide, whereas the other was a glycosylated derivative. Recombinant procarboxypeptidase A2 was purified to homogeneity, and it was shown that its mature active form displays functional properties similar to those of the enzyme directly isolated from human pancreas. The overall yield was approximately 250 mg of proenzyme or 180 mg of mature enzyme/liter of cell culture. The proteolysis-promoted activation process of the recombinant proenzyme has been studied in detail. During maturation by trypsin, the increase in activity of the enzyme is a rapid and monotonic event, which reflects the rate of the proteolytic release of the inhibitory pro-segment and the weaker nature of its interactions with the enzyme moiety compared with procarboxypeptidases of the A1 type. Three main forms of the pro-segment (96, 94, and 92 amino acids), with no inhibitory capability in the severed state, and a single mature carboxypeptidase A2 are produced during this process. No further proteolysis of these pro-segments by the generated carboxypeptidase A2 occurs, in contrast with observations made in other procarboxypeptidases (A1 and B). This differential behavior is a result of the extreme specificity of carboxypeptidase A2.