Performance of student software development teams: the influence of personality and identifying as team members

One prominent approach in the exploration of the variations in project team performance has been to study two components of the aggregate personalities of the team members: conscientiousness and agreeableness. A second line of research, known as self-categorisation theory, argues that identifying as team members and the team's performance norms should substantially influence the team's performance. This paper explores the influence of both these perspectives in university software engineering project teams. Eighty students worked to complete a piece of software in small project teams during 2007 or 2008. To reduce limitations in statistical analysis, Monte Carlo simulation techniques were employed to extrapolate from the results of the original sample to a larger simulated sample (2043 cases, within 319 teams). The results emphasise the importance of taking into account personality (particularly conscientiousness), and both team identification and the team's norm of performance, in order to cultivate higher levels of performance in student software engineering project teams.     

Label-free isolation of a prostate cancer cell among blood cells and the single-cell measurement of drug accumulation using an integrated microfluidic chip

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are found in the blood of patients with cancer. Although these cells are rare, they can provide useful information for chemotherapy. However, isolation of these rare cells from blood is technically challenging because they are small in numbers. An integrated microfluidic chip, dubbed CTC chip, was designed and fabricated for conducting tumor cell isolation. As CTCs usually show multidrug resistance (MDR), the effect of MDR inhibitors on chemotherapeutic drug accumulation in the isolated single tumor cell is measured. As a model of CTC isolation, human prostate cancer cells were mixed with mouse blood cells and the label-free isolation of the tumor cells was conducted based on cell size difference. The major advantages of the CTC chip are the ability for fast cell isolation, followed by multiple rounds of single-cell measurements, suggesting a potential assay for detecting the drug responses based on the liquid biopsy of cancer patients.     

学龄前儿童体力活动研究的十大问题

摘要：目的是回顾与3-5岁儿童体力活动有关的重要研究问题。本文将从三个主要研究领域进行分析：健康效果、体力活动模式、干预和政策。研究的首要问题包括：确定体力活动的健康效果,确定体力活动对保持健康体重的影响,探明体力活动对学习和行为习惯的影响,以及静坐行为对健康的影响。与体力活动模式相关的研究问题包括,3-5岁儿童满足现有体力活动推荐量的情况;影响体力活动的社会和环境因素,包括家庭、幼儿园、社区环境;体力活动如何对学龄儿童期、青少年时期和成年以后产生影响。关于干预和政策方面的研究问题包括,确定在家庭、保育机构、社区环境最有效的促进体力活动的干预策略,以及不同幼儿适用的干预方案,确定有效的干预手段和宣传策略,制定有效的能够增加幼儿体力活动水平的国家、州、地方和机构的政策。总之,全面的了解体力活动对3-5岁儿童健康的影响,以便于掌握该群体的体力活动特点,探索如何促进幼儿的体力活动。     

Developing a student veterans center: The confluence of academic and military cultures

Lynette Cook Francis and Amanda Kraus describe the benefits and challenges of working together with student veterans to develop a program that contributes to their successful transition to higher education.     

Implementing curriculum evaluation: case study of a generic undergraduate degree in health sciences

This case study presents a longitudinal, evidence‐based approach to health science curriculum reform and evaluation. Curriculum in higher education must meet the needs of diverse stakeholders and must respond to dynamic local, national and international contexts, and this creates challenges for evaluation. The long lead time prior to the introduction of new or revised university curriculum (at least two years), the length of degree programmes (three to five years) and the lag time in the availability of objective indicators of degree outcomes (at least one year post‐graduation) mean that findings may be obsolete before an evaluation can be completed. Few would argue that evaluation is important and methods and approaches for conducting curriculum evaluation are proposed in the literature, although few published reports of the outcomes of comprehensive evaluations are evident. This paper discusses potential for evaluation to establish responsive communication between students, teaching staff and programme administrators, ensuring a match between the intended, implemented and attained curriculum.     

Board roles in organisations with a dual board system: Empirical evidence from Taiwanese nonprofit sport organisations

Research on the roles of the board of unitary board systems is well established, while explorations of dual board systems are very limited. We know little about nonprofit sport organisations board roles in countries such as Taiwan that operate with a dual board structure. In consequence, this study explored the roles taken by the board of directors and the board of supervisors in Taiwanese nonprofit sport organisations. Four overarching board of director roles were identified: manage vision and purpose; board duty; human resource and fundraising; and stakeholder focus. For the board of supervisors two primary functions emerged: monitoring results; and board duty and process. The findings of the study extend our understanding of the governance of nonprofit sport organisations and the differences that exist between dual board and single board systems of governance.