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Little Opportunity (little + opportunity)
Selected AbstractsAnti-Predator Signals as Advertisements: Evidence in White-Throated Magpie-JaysETHOLOGY, Issue 6 2009Jesse M. S. Ellis Calls and displays elicited by predators usually function as alarms or to inform predators of their detection. However, predator encounters may afford some individuals the opportunity to demonstrate quality or signal their availability. Here, I report on a class of vocal signals produced in predator-elicited displays that share many characteristics with sexually selected song. White-throated magpie-jays (Calocitta formosa) display at low-threat predators while producing ,loud display calls' (LDCs). I use this term because the calls occur primarily in two display contexts (see below) though occasionally in other contexts as well. Such calls and displays are primarily produced by males, and also occur in one other context, at dawn. Playback experiments showed that despite being elicited by predators, males were more likely than females to respond to LDCs, and more likely to respond when their mate was fertile. Over 134 different call types were produced in over 200 displays by 34 males; the largest minimum repertoire size was 67. Presentations of taxidermic raptor mounts elicited some LDCs, but fewer calls and lower diversity than at dawn or in predator approach displays. The male bias and high diversity suggest that LDCs are an outcome of intersexual selection, while their elicitation by predators suggests an alarm function. I propose that male magpie-jays use predator encounters as opportunities to advertise their presence and availability as mates; they use LDCs as songs. Such a communication system seems to have been favored by the unusual social system of magpie-jays, in which female groups defend territories and males have little opportunity to defend resources for mate attraction, forcing them to advertise when females are paying the most attention, during predator encounters. [source] ,I'm Home for the Kids': Contradictory Implications for Work,Life Balance of Teleworking MothersGENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 5 2008Margo Hilbrecht This study explores the experience of time flexibility and its relationship to work,life balance among married female teleworkers with school-aged children. Drawing from a larger study of teleworkers from a Canadian financial corporation, 18 mothers employed in professional positions discussed work, leisure and their perceptions of work,life balance in in-depth interviews. Telework was viewed positively because flexible scheduling facilitated optimal time management. A key factor was the pervasiveness of caregiving, which could result in ongoing tensions and contradictions between the ethic of care and their employment responsibilities. The ideology of ,intensive mothering' meant that work schedules were closely tied to the rhythms of children's school and leisure activities. The different temporal demands of motherhood and employment resulted in little opportunity for personal leisure. Time ,saved' from not having to commute to an office was reallocated to caregiving, housework or paid employment rather than to time for their self. The women also experienced a traditional gendered division of household labour and viewed telework as a helpful tool for combining their dual roles. Time flexibility enhanced their sense of balancing work and life and their perceived quality of life. At the same time, they did not question whether having the primary responsibility for caregiving while engaged in paid employment at home was fair or whether it was a form of exploitation. [source] Virtual Experiments and Their Use in Teaching Experimental DesignINTERNATIONAL STATISTICAL REVIEW, Issue 3 2007Paul L. Darius Summary The ability to design experiments in an appropriate and efficient way is an important skill, but students typically have little opportunity to get that experience. Most textbooks introduce standard general-purpose designs, and then proceed with the analysis of data already collected. In this paper we explore a tool for gaining design experience: computer-based virtual experiments. These are software environments which mimic a real situation of interest and invite the user to collect data to answer a research question. Two prototype environments are described. The first one is suitable for a course that deals with screening or response surface designs, the second one allows experimenting with block and row-column designs. They are parts of a collection we developed called ENV2EXP, and can be freely used over the web. We also describe our experience in using them in several courses over the last few years. [source] Psychiatric nurses' attitudes towards patient autonomy in depot clinicsJOURNAL OF ADVANCED NURSING, Issue 4 2001Bodil Svedberg RPN Psychiatric nurses' attitudes towards patient autonomy in depot clinics Aim.,The aim of this qualitative study was to explore how psychiatric nurses experience patient autonomy in relation to their professional role in depot clinics. Background.,The administration of depot neuroleptics at outpatient clinics is a common task for psychiatric nurses in many countries. The procedure is characterized by brief contacts often allowing little opportunity for adequate monitoring of the treatment and a dialog between nurses and patients. As nurses have an important role in involving patients in decision-making, there is a need to analyse the nurses' attitudes towards giving depot neuroleptics from the perspective of autonomy. Method.,Nine experienced psychiatric nurses were interviewed using open-ended questions. The steps of a phenomenological descriptive method guided the data analysis. Findings.,The structure describes how benevolent attitudes towards patient autonomy motivated the nurses' interventions in relation to how they experienced their own professional authority. The structure consists of four variations: (1) Beneficent interventions used with patients perceived as co-operative when the nurses experienced a high degree of professional authority. (2) Paternalistic interventions used with patients perceived as ambiguous towards medication when the nurses experienced an arbitrary professional authority in collaboration with team members. (3) Weak paternalistic interventions used with patients perceived as unwilling when the nurses experienced having sufficient professional authority in the treatment situation. (4) Nonmaleficent interventions used with patients perceived as being resigned when the nurses experienced a low degree of professional authority within the team. Conclusions.,The findings indicate that psychiatric nurses' experience of their professional authority is closely related to the organization of the depot treatment and that brief contacts do not favour the establishment of collaborative relationships with patients. When injection-giving nurses, as patients' key workers, have overall responsibility for co-ordinating the patients' treatment they can encourage patient autonomy by helping patients understand the meaning of depot medication and its benefits. Further clinical research regarding the involvement of nurses in the treatment as well as patients' experiences of treatment with depot neuroleptics is needed to allow suggestions about improvements of the organization of the treatment. [source] User Behavior and the "Globalness" of Internet: From a Taiwan Users' PerspectiveJOURNAL OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION, Issue 2 2002Chun Chou Liu It is believed that the cyberworld knows no borders and boundaries. Users from all corners of the world are connected. However, the literature stops short of telling us how meaningful and valuable its "borderless" nature actually is to the Internet users themselves. Have they taken full advantage of whatever freedom is available to them in roaming the cyberworld? Do they venture beyond their language and/or cultural group to interact with those whoM they normally would have little opportunity to meet otherwise? To what extent do they take advantage of the opportunity to venture beyond the limits of their "real" worlds? Taiwan houses one of the most vigorous information industries in the world. This paper looks at the general patterns of Internet use in Taiwan, including online activities for communication, information access, and e-commerce. Secondly, a special effort is made to examine the "globalness" of Taiwan users' Internet behavior, and the factors contributing to these patterns of use. In Taiwan, the Internet as a medium may indeed be "global," yet the user continues to live within the "local," the "place" one relates to, where his/her needs and desires are generated, and where one feels a sense of belonging. One may briefly venture out of this locality to accomplish a task, fulfill a goal, or simply satisfy his/her curiosity; however, as pointed out by Wang and Servaes (2000), the importance, significance, and relevance of the global are not as great as that of the local. [source] Significance of working conditions on burnout in anesthetistsACTA ANAESTHESIOLOGICA SCANDINAVICA, Issue 1 2006W. Lederer Background:, The influence of working conditions on the development of burnout syndrome was assessed in anesthetists working at a university hospital. Methods:, Self-reporting questionnaires were used to assess physical health and emotional well-being (Health and Stress Profile), burnout syndrome (Maslach Burnout Inventory) and working conditions (Instrument for Stress-Oriented Task Analysis) in anesthetists. Results:, Twenty-three anesthetists (25.8%) appeared to be at risk for burnout, and three anesthetists (3.4%) had already developed full-blown burnout syndrome. Anesthetists at risk for burnout more frequently suffered from limited complexity of work (P = 0.001), lacking individual time control (P = 0.004), lack of participation possibilities (P = 0.012), and had more physical complaints (P = 0.017) and greater job dissatisfaction (P = 0.002) than did their colleagues with no burnout symptoms. Conclusion:, Job conditions providing little opportunity to influence work pace and participation contribute to the development of burnout syndrome. Communication and contact with colleagues appear to be an important preventive regulative. [source] Making and sharing decisions about management with patients: the views and experiences of pre-registration house officers in general practice and hospitalMEDICAL EDUCATION, Issue 1 2002J E Thistlethwaite Objectives To explore the views and experiences of pre-registration house officers (PRHOs) in general practice and hospital settings regarding the concept of patient partnership and their experience of involving patients in management decisions. Design The 12 PRHOs who had graduated from British universities and who were working within the Yorkshire Deanery were interviewed towards the end of their four-month general practice attachments. The interviews were semi-structured and analysed qualitatively. Results Three major themes emerged. The PRHOs perceived differences in approach between consultations carried out in hospital and primary care settings, with general practitioners being more likely to share information and decisions with patients. As medical students, the PRHOs had little opportunity to practise sharing information and management decisions with patients, and variable experience of this after graduation. On the whole they were favourable to the concept of patient partnership. Conclusions Medical students and PRHOs lack training and opportunities to decide on management and discuss this with patients and yet, particularly in general practice settings, they have to practise these skills. The PRHOs had begun to develop strategies to decide how much information to give to patients and to what extent to involve patients in management decisions. This is an area that needs further consideration when planning both undergraduate and postgraduate medical education. [source] Population genetic signatures of diffuse co-evolution between leaf-cutting ants and their cultivar fungiMOLECULAR ECOLOGY, Issue 1 2007A. S. MIKHEYEV Abstract Switching of symbiotic partners pervades most mutualisms, despite mechanisms that appear to enforce partner fidelity. To investigate the interplay of forces binding and dissolving mutualistic pairings, we investigated partner fidelity at the population level in the attine ant,fungal cultivar mutualism. The ants and their cultivars exhibit both broad-scale co-evolution, as well as cultivar switching, with short-term symbiont fidelity maintained by vertical transmission of maternal garden inoculates via dispersing queens and by the elimination of alien cultivar strains. Using microsatellite markers, we genotyped cultivar fungi associated with five co-occurring Panamanian attine ant species, representing the two most derived genera, leaf-cutters Atta and Acromyrmex. Despite the presence of mechanisms apparently ensuring the cotransmission of symbiont genotypes, different species and genera of ants sometimes shared identical fungus garden genotypes, indicating widespread cultivar exchange. The cultivar population was largely unstructured with respect to host ant species, with only 10% of the structure in genetic variance being attributable to partitioning among ant species and genera. Furthermore, despite significant genetic and ecological dissimilarity between Atta and Acromyrmex, generic difference accounted for little, if any, variance in cultivar population structure, suggesting that cultivar exchange dwarfs selective forces that may act to create co-adaptive ant,cultivar combinations. Thus, binding forces that appear to enforce host fidelity are relatively weak and pairwise associations between cultivar lineages and ant species have little opportunity for evolutionary persistence. This implicates that mechanisms other than partner fidelity feedback play important roles in stabilizing the leafcutter ant,fungus mutualism over evolutionary time. [source] The role of nursing unit culture in shaping research utilization behaviors,RESEARCH IN NURSING & HEALTH, Issue 4 2008Shannon D. Scott Abstract We conducted a focused ethnography of a pediatric critical care unit to examine the role of nursing unit culture related to research utilization. Four significant aspects of the unit culture shaped nurses' research utilization. A hierarchical structure of authority, routinized and technology-driven work at the bedside, a workplace ethos that discouraged innovation, and an emphasis on clinical experience acted together to teach nurses both that they were to do as they were told and that they were not expected to use research. Nurses perceived that the behaviors expected of them were arbitrarily determined by physicians and managers in charge. Consequently, they were reluctant to step outside of routine and physician-ordered nursing care. This left little opportunity for research utilization. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Res Nurs Health 31:298,309, 2008 [source] Interviewer feedback in repeated interviews involving forced confabulationAPPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2007Jessica M. Hanba The effects of confirmatory interviewer feedback on eyewitness testimony following forcibly confabulated and accurate responses to repeated interview questions were investigated in two experiments. The first experiment showed that, relative to neutral feedback, confirmatory feedback provided after a forcibly confabulated response greatly increased the likelihood that participants would provide the same confabulated response when re-interviewed 2 days later, led participants to report these repeated confabulations with greater speed and fewer expressions of doubt, and increased the prevalence of false memories. Confirmatory interviewer feedback provided following accurate responses appeared to have more modest consequences for consistency and confidence, but ceiling effects provided little opportunity for observing potential effects. A second experiment showed that these effects of confirmatory feedback are of considerable practical significance, in that, regardless of their accuracy, responses that had earlier been reinforced with confirmatory feedback were much more likely to be judged by others as credible. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Optioneering: A New Basis for Engagement Between Architects and Their CollaboratorsARCHITECTURAL DESIGN, Issue 4 2010Dominik Holzer Abstract Conventionally, architects are somewhat tardy when inviting engineers to join their projects. By only introducing consulting engineers to participate in the later stages of the design process, engineers are commonly assigned a fixing role. This provides little opportunity for creative engineering solutions at the generative stage. Optioneering, a new business management model, however, offers the possibility of a new collaborative method for interaction between designers and their partners. Dominik Holzer and Steven Downing describe how a research project between the Spatial Information Research Laboratory (SIAL) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and the engineering firm Arup investigated the capability of this new form of collaboration. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] | ||||||||||||||||