The Foodborne Outbreak Challenge—Using Experiential Learning to Foster Interdisciplinary Training Among Students on Foodborne Disease Outbreak Investigations

The Integrated Food Safety Centers of Excellence aim to develop novel learning methods to educate and train the future public health workforce to investigate foodborne outbreaks. The Foodborne Outbreak Challenge (FOC) was a one‐day event hosted by the Colorado Integrated Food Safety Center of Excellence at the Colorado School of Public Health. The FOC incorporated experiential, problem‐based, and interdisciplinary pedagogies from case studies, simulation exercises, and public health case competitions, to deliver a novel learning experience that met the training needs of a multidisciplinary foodborne outbreak response team with diverse skills sets. The event received positive feedback, and participants demonstrated knowledge gain. Event materials are available for other institutions to use.     

Does Interpretive Test Score Information Help Teachers?

To what extent do teachers possess the competence to interpret state testing program results properly?     

Citizen Satisfaction with Public Meetings Used for Risk Communication

Although public meetings are a frequent method of public participation and risk communication, little research investigates what citizens think about their use in environmental management. To examine satisfaction with public meetings, residents of two neighboring communities received questionnaires following a public meeting about a local landfill. Respondents included residents who did and did not attend the meeting. Irrespective of whether respondents had ever attended a public meeting, meeting expectations and perceptions of relational/informational communication at meetings, including whether respondents thought meeting organizers were genuinely interested in participants' comments or meetings were informative, predicted satisfaction. Perceived risk associated with the recent meeting's topic and credibility of government agencies that frequently conduct meetings also predicted satisfaction.     

Materials budget allocation: A formula fitness review

This paper describes a formula fitness review project at a top college library. It was discovered that the collection policy was very outdated and the allocation formula was no longer a good fit. Calculations had become arbitrary expressions of years of ad hoc annual adjustments. Although the formula was supposed to support multiobjective allocation decisions, this was not actually happening in an unambiguous fashion. Formula decomposition, formula simplification and multiattribute utility theory suggest that a change from the traditional allocation formulas–including abandoning aggregate topical allocations and FTE—despite the popularity of these variables–is probably in order.     

Mindfulness for Teachers: A Pilot Study to Assess Effects on Stress,Burnout, and Teaching Efficacy

Despite the crucial role of teachers in fostering children's academic learning and social–emotional well‐being, addressing teacher stress in the classroom remains a significant challenge in education. This study reports results from a randomized controlled pilot trial of a modified Mindfulness‐Based Stress Reduction course (mMBSR) adapted specifically for teachers. Results suggest that the course may be a promising intervention, with participants showing significant reductions in psychological symptoms and burnout, improvements in observer‐rated classroom organization and performance on a computer task of affective attentional bias, and increases in self‐compassion. In contrast, control group participants showed declines in cortisol functioning over time and marginally significant increases in burnout. Furthermore, changes in mindfulness were correlated in the expected direction with changes across several outcomes (psychological symptoms, burnout, and sustained attention) in the intervention group. Implications of these findings for the training and support of teachers are discussed.     

Sympathy and Cosmopolitanism: Affective Limits in Cosmopolitan Reading

This paper argues that contemporary understandings of cosmopolitan literature are significantly limited by their dependence on sympathetic attachments as constitutive of cosmopolitan practice. I trace a genealogy of the connection between sympathy, cosmopolitanism, and the novel that extends from Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant to Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah, in order to contend that contemporary models of cosmopolitan reading rely on problematically normative definitions of the ‘human’. J.M. Coetzee's Boyhood, I propose, suggests an alternative model of cosmopolitan reading that neither equates sympathy with humanity, nor precludes those who ‘feel apart’ from participation in cosmopolitan community.     

A review of literature and hypotheses on new technology-based firms

This paper examines the existing literature on new technology-based firms in an attempt to understand how such companies contribute to the vitality of an economy and to see which variables are critical in enabling them to do so. From recent research efforts, we have drawn together a set of hypotheses and organized them around four central questions: (1) What do new firms contribute to the economy? (2) What factors contribute to the success of such enterprises? (3) In what cultural contexts do new businesses succeed? and (4) Which government policies are effective in stimulating and supporting new companies? We found that existing studies suggest (1) that new technology-based firms contribute significantly to an economy in terms of exports, employment, taxes paid, research and development, and innovations; (2) that the founders of these new businesses tend to have a strong entrepreneurial heritage, a development- rather research-oriented background, and a high need to achieve and are young and highly educated; (3) that sector differences may be a more important influence on company location than are regional policies; and (4) that no one government program has proven itself to be more than marginally successful in stimulating industrial innovation.