Transition to law school and law student well-being : The importance of professional legal identity

The empirically established decline in law student well-being during the first year of law school is a red-flagged imprimatur for first year curriculum change. This article suggests that by engaging law students with the concept of a positive professional identity, student engagement and intrinsic motivation will increase because they are working towards a career goal that has meaning and purpose. Law school is a time of professional transformation and the legal academy can take steps to ensure that this transformation is inculcated with positive messages. Literature from the fields of law and psychology is analysed in this article, to explain how a positive conception of the legal profession (and a student’s future role within it) can increase a student’s psychological well-being – at law school and beyond.

Importance of sustainability-related cost components in highway infrastructure : perspective of stakeholders in Australia

Highway infrastructure development typically requires major capital input. Unless planned properly, such requirements can cause serious financial constraints for investors. The push for sustainability adds a new dimension to the complexity of evaluating highway projects. Finding environmentally and socially responsible solutions for highway construction will improve its potential for acceptance by the society and in many instances the infrastructure's life span. Even so, the prediction and determination of a project's long-term financial viability can be a precarious exercise. Existing studies in this area have not indicated details of how to identify and deal with costs incurred in pursuing sustainability measures in highway infrastructure. This paper provides insights into the major challenges of implementing sustainability in highway project development in terms of financial concerns and obligations. It discusses the results from recent research through a literature study and a questionnaire survey of key industry stakeholders involved in highway infrastructure development. The research identified critical cost components relating to sustainability measures based on perspectives of industry stakeholders. All stakeholders believe sustainability related costs are an integral part of the decision making. However, the importance rating of these costs is relative to each stakeholder's core business objectives. This will influence the way these cost components are dealt with during the evaluation of highway investment alternatives and financial implications. This research encourages positive thinking among the highway infrastructure practitioners about sustainability. It calls for the construction industry to maximise sustainability deliverables while ensuring financial viability over the life cycle of highway infrastructure projects.

The importance of individual difference : examining anthropomorphic tendency and responses to spokes-characters

Anthropomorphism is a cognitive bias, which occurs when individuals see human characteristics in a non-human agent, object or animal. Anthropomorphism is especially interesting to marketers, because once anthropomorphic bias has been triggered, it can lead to a greater feeling of connectedness to a non-human agent (Tam, Lee and Chao, 2013), the emulation of behaviours (Aggarwal and McGill, 2012) or greater attribution of brand personality and brand liking (Delbaere, McQuarrie and Phillips, 2011). Importantly, research now shows that levels of this tendency vary between individuals (Waytz, Cacioppo and Epley, 2010), but research to date has failed to focus on how anthropomorphic tendency influences individual responses to marketing communications messages. Spokes-characters present an ideal context through which to examine this gap, given that they function as personified brands, designed to trigger consumer anthropomorphic tendency. Further, little is understood about how spokes-characters operate and which consumers will prefer them to their human counterparts. Like anthropomorphic research, much empirical work to date has focused on design and outcomes, examining the sender’s encoding process and the feedback generated, but ignoring the individual decoding process that is so important to understanding individual differences and message effectiveness. The current research employs three experiments using an online survey with stimulus exposure to show that anthropomorphic tendency, personality similarity and spokes-character type all have relevance to the understanding of this complex relationship. Study one and two indicate that while a human spokesperson is still preferred by many, higher levels of anthropomorphic tendency increase likeability of cartoon spokes characters. Study three highlights the importance of personality similarity, which further increases likability. Additional analyses provide key findings concerning the nature of anthropomorphic tendency as an individual difference and trait. This research contributes to a greater understanding of anthropomorphism theory and fills existing gaps in the consumer psychology and marketing communications literature.

Two-stage power network reconfiguration strategy considering node importance and restored generation capacity

Network reconfiguration after complete blackout of a power system is an essential step for power system restoration. A new node importance evaluation method is presented based on the concept of regret, and maximisation of the average importance of a path is employed as the objective of finding the optimal restoration path. Then, a two-stage method is presented to optimise the network reconfiguration strategy. Specifically, the restoration sequence of generating units is first optimised so as to maximise the restored generation capacity, then the optimal restoration path is selected to restore the generating nodes concerned and the issues of selecting a serial or parallel restoration mode and the reconnecting failure of a transmission line are next considered. Both the restoration path selection and skeleton-network determination are implemented together in the proposed method, which overcomes the shortcoming of separate decision-making in the existing methods. Finally, the New England 10-unit 39-bus power system and the Guangzhou power system in South China are employed to demonstrate the basic features of the proposed method.

The importance of reporting housing and husbandry in rat research

In 1963, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) first issued guidelines for animal housing and husbandry. The most recent 2010 revision emphasizes animal care “in ways judged to be scientifically, technically, and humanely appropriate” (National Institutes of Health, 2010, p. XIII). The goal of these guidelines is to ensure humanitarian treatment of animals and to optimize the quality of research. Although these animal care guidelines cover a substantial amount of information regarding animal housing and husbandry, researchers generally do not report all these variables (see Table ​Table1).1). The importance of housing and husbandry conditions with respect to standardization across different research laboratories has been debated previously (Crabbe et al., 1999; Van Der Staay and Steckler, 2002; Wahlsten et al., 2003; Wolfer et al., 2004; Van Der Staay, 2006; Richter et al., 2010, 2011). This paper focuses on several animal husbandry and housing issues that are particularly relevant to stress responses in rats, including transportation, handling, cage changing, housing conditions, light levels and the light–dark cycle. We argue that these key animal housing and husbandry variables should be reported in greater detail in an effort to raise awareness about extraneous experimental variables, especially those that have the potential to interact with the stress response.

High energy states of gold and their importance in electrocatalytic processes at surfaces and interfaces

The ability of metals to store or trap considerable amounts of energy, and thus exist in a non-equilibrium or metastable state, is very well known in metallurgy; however, such behaviour, which is intimately connected with the defect character of metals, has been largely ignored in noble metal surface electrochemistry. Techniques for generating unusually high energy surface states for gold, and the unusual voltammetric responses of such states, are outlined. The surprisingly high (and complex) electrocatalytic activity of gold in aqueous media is attributed to the presence of a range of such non-equilibrium states as the vital entities at active sites on conventional gold surfaces. The possible relevance of these ideas to account for the remarkable catalytic activity of oxide-supported gold microparticles is briefly outlined.

A reciprocal collaborative method using relevance feedback and feature importance

In a people-to-people matching systems, filtering is widely applied to find the most suitable matches. The results returned are either too many or only a few when the search is generic or specific respectively. The use of a sophisticated recommendation approach becomes necessary. Traditionally, the object of recommendation is the item which is inanimate. In online dating systems, reciprocal recommendation is required to suggest a partner only when the user and the recommended candidate both are satisfied. In this paper, an innovative reciprocal collaborative method is developed based on the idea of similarity and common neighbors, utilizing the information of relevance feedback and feature importance. Extensive experiments are carried out using data gathered from a real online dating service. Compared to benchmarking methods, our results show the proposed method can achieve noticeable better performance.

Consumer created reviews and ratings : the importance of word of mouth in information search

This study explored the creation, dissemination and exchange of electronic word of mouth, in the form of product reviews and ratings of digital technology products. Based on 43 in-depth interviews and 500 responses to an online survey, it reveals a new communication model describing consumers' info-active and info-passive information search styles. The study delivers an in-depth understanding of consumers' attitudes towards current advertising tools and user-generated content, and points to new marketing techniques emerging in the online environment.

Integration of sentiment analysis into customer relational model : the importance of feature ontology and synonym

Online business or Electronic Commerce (EC) is getting popular among customers today, as a result large number of product reviews have been posted online by the customers. This information is very valuable not only for prospective customers to make decision on buying product but also for companies to gather information of customers’ satisfaction about their products. Opinion mining is used to capture customer reviews and separated this review into subjective expressions (sentiment word) and objective expressions (no sentiment word). This paper proposes a novel, multi-dimensional model for opinion mining, which integrates customers’ characteristics and their opinion about any products. The model captures subjective expression from product reviews and transfers to fact table before representing in multi-dimensions named as customers, products, time and location. Data warehouse techniques such as OLAP and Data Cubes were used to analyze opinionated sentences. A comprehensive way to calculate customers’ orientation on products’ features and attributes are presented in this paper.

The importance of wolves

Short story in journal. "It was in winter, when the peach tree in our backyard was bare, and asthma kept me from school for days at a time, that the wolves first came. You could hear them after dark, howling from the forest that covered Mt Gravatt..."--publisher website

The importance of importance : its impact on decision-making in mall retail categories during an economic downturn

The study examines how, during an economic downturn, the perceived importance of the value offering of retail store categories, as identified by a major international mall operator based in Australia, influences the relationship between consumers’ shopping attitudes and likelihood of purchasing in those categories. The findings show variance in the importance pertaining to retail store categories between those that have and those that have not altered their shopping behaviour. Different mediating effects were found in the major, mini-major, leisure, apparel, and mobile phone categories, suggestive of each group having differing levels of self-interest in the value offerings of each category, thus, symptomatic of dissimilar decision-making strategies for each group. Contributions to theory and practice are discussed.

Associative Pavlovian conditioning leads to an increase in spinophilin-immunoreactive dendritic spines in the lateral amygdala

Changes in dendritic spine number and shape are believed to reflect structural plasticity consequent to learning. Previous studies have strongly suggested that the dorsal subnucleus of the lateral amygdala is an important site of physiological plasticity in Pavlovian fear conditioning. In the present study, we examined the effect of auditory fear conditioning on dendritic spine numbers in the dorsal subnucleus of the lateral amygdala using an immunolabelling procedure to visualize the spine-associated protein spinophilin. Associatively conditioned rats that received paired tone and shock presentations had 35% more total spinophilin-immunoreactive spines than animals that had unpaired stimulation, consistent with the idea that changes in the number of dendritic spines occur during learning and account in part for memory.

The importance of agency in facilitating the transition to a multifunctional countryside

We appreciate Holmes' body of work relating to transitions within the Australian landscape, and welcome the opportunity to engage in a discussion on this topic. The paper to which Holmes refers (Bjørkhaug and Richards, 2008) examined the application of agricultural (rather than landscape) multifunctionality in both Norway and Australia. Of specific focus was how non-tradeable concerns, such as environmental sustainability, faired under these divergent systems. We argued that Norway's multifunctionality was strong, due to it being embraced at both the policy and actor level, whereas Australia's could be described as weak. This ‘weak multifunctionality’ that we observed in Australia was due to an emerging bi-lateral (state and federal) policy framework that advocated the importance of environmental values which was rarely embraced by landholders who found themselves trapped on the ‘agricultural treadmill’. The nature of the treadmill is that alternative forms of land use are unthinkable when on-farm investments have been made that support the status quo – to get bigger and/or more efficient. For many of the Australian landholders interviewed in relation to this study, efficiency in production was at odds with the values necessary to effect a transition toward multifunctionality. For instance, graziers in Central Queensland were unconvinced of the value of conserving native flora and fauna when economic viability can be better assured through clear felling native forests to increase the productive capacity of the land.

The influence of school science teachers : the differential importance attributed by males and females to encouragement from science teachers

Research on the achievement and retention of female students in science and mathematics is located within a context of falling levels of participation in physical science and mathematics courses in Australian schools, and underrepresentation of females in some science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses. The Interests and Recruitment in Science (IRIS) project is an international project that aims to contribute to understanding and improving recruitment, retention and gender equity in STEM higher education. Nearly 3500 first year students in 30 Australian universities responded to the IRIS survey of 5-point Likert items and open responses. This paper explores gender differences in first year university students’ responses to three questions about important influences on their course choice. The IRIS study found good teachers were rated highly by both males and females as influential in choosing STEM courses, and significantly higher numbers of females rated personal encouragement from senior high school science teacher as very important. In suggestions for addressing sex disparities in male-dominated STEM courses, more females indicated the importance of good teaching/encouragement and more females said (unspecified) encouragement. This study relates to the influence of school science teachers and results are discussed in relation to implications for science education.