Intensification of university–industry relationships and its impact on academic research

This paper analyses the intensification of university–industry relationships and its impact on university research. The paper consists of recent follow-up research to an international comparative research project conducted in the 1990s. It deals specifically with the Québec (Canada) situation. Twenty-eight in-depth interviews were conducted in the winter of 2003 with university researchers and an additional five interviews with technology transfer officers. The interviews were conducted in six francophone higher education institutions in Québec. With regard to university–industry relationships, the interviews revealed that university researchers in scientific and technological fields conducted innovation-oriented research, which benefits their graduate students and the institution itself. Freedom of publication is somewhat conditioned by intellectual property constraints. Thus, a majority of university researchers adopt an “entrepreneurial ethos” which they find compatible with their academic values. The intensification of university–industry relationships may also have latent dysfunctional effects with regard to conflicts of interest, as some university researchers have created start-up companies which act both as research funding sources and as beneficiaries of research results. Thus, intellectual property and conflict of interest issues evolve in a grey zone and are often sources of stress and tension for researchers. However harsh some disputes may become over these issues, they are resolved, at least in the context analysed in this research, in ways that satisfy both the researcher and the institutions.

Making Our Way Through: Voices of Hispanic Counselor Educators

Through 23 open‐ended questionnaires and 8 individual interviews, this phenomenological study explored the experiences of Hispanic men and women (N = 23) who completed doctoral degrees in counselor education. Six themes were identified: family role models, educational support, parental expectations, ethnic identity, acculturation/cultural expectations, and intrinsic motivation.     

THE ROLE OF LONELINESS IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION IN CLINICAL AND SCHOOL‐BASED YOUTH

Identifying mechanisms that explain the relationship between anxiety and depression are needed. The Tripartite Model is one model that has been proposed to help explain the association between these two problems, positing a shared component called negative affect. The objective of the present study was to examine the role of loneliness in relation to anxiety and depression. A total of 10,891 school‐based youth (Grades 2–12) and 254 clinical children and adolescents receiving residential treatment (Grades 2–12) completed measures of loneliness, anxiety, depression, and negative affect. The relationships among loneliness, anxiety, depression, and negative affect were examined, including whether loneliness was a significant intervening variable. Various mediational tests converged showing that loneliness was a significant mediator in the relationship between anxiety and depression. This effect was found across children (Grades 2–6) and adolescent (Grades 7–12) school‐based youth. In the clinical sample, loneliness was found to be a significant mediator between anxiety and depression, even after introducing negative affect based on the Tripartite Model. Results supported loneliness as a significant risk factor in youths' lives that may result from anxiety and place youth at risk for subsequent depression. Implications related to intervention and prevention in school settings are also discussed.     

The transition from higher education to employment in Europe: the analysis of the time to obtain the first job

This paper investigates the determinants of the transition from higher education to work across Europe using various specifications of duration models and a one-time multi-country survey of university graduates from nine European countries. Results point to differences between the North and South of Europe in the difficulty of getting a first job. They confirm that individual characteristics such as the field/level of studies or the socioeconomic background, and individual job search bear a significant relationship to the probability of finding a job. Evidence of unobserved heterogeneity is also found.     

Superintendent’s leadership: the cultural aspects of the role enactment

This qualitative study seeks to create a better understanding of the work of school superintendents. This study was conducted using ethnographic techniques as a way to describe the practice of a Latino superintendent in a borderland community in south Texas. Guiding questions for this study were: What goes on in the workday life of a superintendent? and how does the superintendent enact his role as superintendent? Field study for this qualitative inquiry occurred over a period of seven months. Data for this study, including transgressive data, were collected primarily through participant observations, semi-structured ethnographic interviews, from artefacts and journal notes.     

Learning to select the correct answer in multi-stream question answering

Question answering (QA) is the task of automatically answering a question posed in natural language. Currently, there exists several QA approaches, and, according to recent evaluation results, most of them are complementary. That is, different systems are relevant for different kinds of questions. Somehow, this fact indicates that a pertinent combination of various systems should allow to improve the individual results. This paper focuses on this problem, namely, the selection of the correct answer from a given set of responses corresponding to different QA systems. In particular, it proposes a supervised multi-stream approach that decides about the correctness of answers based on a set of features that describe: (i) the compatibility between question and answer types, (ii) the redundancy of answers across streams, as well as (iii) the overlap and non-overlap information between the question–answer pair and the support text. Experimental results are encouraging; evaluated over a set of 190 questions in Spanish and using answers from 17 different QA systems, our multi-stream QA approach could reach an estimated QA performance of 0.74, significantly outperforming the estimated performance from the best individual system (0.53) as well as the result from best traditional multi-stream QA approach (0.60).