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Syphilis is a systemic, infectious disease caused byWe report a case of secondary syphilis with thyroid gland and ocular involvement in a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) negative patient.We present the patient's history, clinical findings, laboratory test results, imaging and management.A 39-year-old Caucasian, HIV unaffected woman presented with acute midline neck swelling, dyspnea and difficulty to talk or swallow. Serologic tests for syphilis were positive. PCR performed on a thyroid fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) aspirate was positive forWe report an unusual case of thyroid swelling in a secondary syphilis infection. Awareness of syphilis as a differential diagnosis is important in a risk population.

Studies that examine the impact of food prices on conflict usually assume that (all) changes in international food prices are exogenous shocks for individual countries or local areas. By isolating ...

This special issue presents a sample of modern work on self-regulated learning (SRL) among high ability and gifted students. It includes diverse views about the construct per se, and gifted student...

Based on social exchange theory, we investigate the impact of HRM investments made by two important HR actors, i.e. line managers and the HR department, on employees’ affective commitment. More specifically, we examine the independent and joint impact of three different independent variables: the line manager’s enactment of HR practices, the line manager’s relations-oriented leadership behaviour and the HR department’s service quality. We contribute to existing literature in two ways. First, we pay attention to the HRM role of line managers, a topic largely neglected in SHRM research. Second, we focus on perceived HRM rather than intended HRM, because this is seen as the driver of employees’ attitudinal and behavioural reactions. Data for this study were collected among 1363 employees (response rate 72%), working in three different service organizations. The results of a moderated regression analysis indicate that line managers can enhance employee affective commitment by both the effective enactment of HR practices and good relations-oriented leadership behaviour. High service quality by the HR department has an additional positive effect on employees’ affective commitment. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Articles in this special issue present recent advances in using state-of-the-art software systems that gather data with which to examine and measure features of learning and particularly self-regulated learning (SRL). Despite important advances, there remain challenges. I examine key features of SRL and how they are measured using common tools. I advance the case that traces of cognition and metacognition offer critical information about SRL that other state-of-the-art measurements cannot.

Research on the impact of human resource management (HRM) on firm performance has increased since the end of the nineties. Despite the pile of studies and results, critical assessments of this literature stream point to several empirical and theoretical gaps. We focus on two empirical gaps. First, there is a lack of attention to innovation as a measure of firm performance outcome. Most articles use financial (e.g., return on assets (ROA)), organisational (e.g., productivity) and employee related (e.g., commitment) performance measures. Yet, Western knowledge economies consider innovation to be a driving force of economic growth, and international competitive advantage. Moreover, innovation is a function of a firm's ability to create, manage and maintain knowledge. Because knowledge is created by and stored within individuals, human resources as well as HRM may play an important role as drivers of innovation. Second, HRM is considered to be a large company phenomenon. Yet, small businesses provide a great ...

In February 1996, the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) initiated a bloody war to establish a Mao-style “people's republic.” A decade later, however, they signed a peace agreement with the government, joined the mainstream political parties in parliament and in an interim government, and participated in democratic elections. This article provides some insight into the Nepalese Maoists's strategic and ideological thinking. More specifically, this article shows the reason behind the party's change of tactics and goals and describes the process in which these changes materialized.

School tasks interact with student motivation, cognition, and instruction to influence learning and achievement. Heeding calls for additional research linking motivational and cognitive factors in learning and instruction on specific tasks within authentic classroom settings we quantitatively and qualitatively track 90 tenth‐grade science students’ motivation, reported use of learning strategies, achievement, calibration, and task perceptions as they engage in a well‐structured task (WST) and an ill‐structured task (IST). Students achieved higher grades on, and reported more ease and value for, the WST whereas they utilised critical thinking and peer learning strategies more on the IST. Lower academic achievers calibrated their achievement less accurately on each task and experienced lower grades, interest, ease, and management capability on the IST. Conversely, higher academic achieving students reported more self‐efficacy and effort regulation and lower anxiety and elaboration on the IST. Motivation – n...

The direction of UK energy policy requires a renewed impetus if the goal of climate change stabilization is to be met. Cost is not the main issue: a transformation to a low-carbon energy system may be no more expensive than meeting future energy demands with fossil fuels. Institutional barriers are preventing the large-scale adoption of the necessary technologies. New institutions to promote low-carbon technologies have not yet led to investment on the necessary scale. Further changes to the operation of the UK electricity markets to create a ‘level playing field’ for small-scale and intermittent generation are necessary. UK policy can contribute to international agreements following on from the Kyoto Accord, which also need to address the institutional barriers to energy technology development and transfer.

Realizing the promise of software technologies in education requires thinking differently about how software simultaneously can serve research and contribute to learning. This article examines 3 axioms underlying contemporary educational psychology: Learners construct knowledge, learners are agents, and data include lots of randomness. By drawing out corollaries of these axioms, this research uncovers significant challenges researchers face in using classical forms of experimental research to build a basis for school reform and for testing school reforms using randomized field trials. This article describes a software system, gStudy, that is designed to address these challenges by gathering finer grained data that better support theorizing about the processes of learning and self-regulated learning. This research illustrates how this can be realized and suggests 10 ways that using software like gStudy can help pull up research by its bootstraps and bolster searches for what works.

Aquatic funnel trapping with commercially available minnow traps has proven effective for sampling several aquatic snake species. However, the efficacy of this technique for sampling snakes has received little controlled evaluation. We investigated the ability of aquatic snakes to escape from three funnel trap varieties (cylindrical steel, cylindrical plastic, and rectangular collapsible nylon mesh). We found that when intentionally released into traps, the majority (74%) of snakes escaped within 24 hours. Snakes escaped most frequently from collapsible traps, and of the species tested, Seminatrix pygaea escaped most frequently. We found significant differences in capture rates among trap types for S. pygaea, Farancia abacura (both captured most in plastic traps), and Nerodiafasciata (captured most in steel traps). Additionally, as we captured many large aquatic salamanders (Siren spp. and Amphiuma means), we also report trapping efficacies of the funnel traps for these amphibians.

Integrating state-of-the-art computer technologies with pedagogically sound practice provides interesting challenges and potentially significant opportunities to simultaneously promote and examine learning in context. This paper unfolds in 3 parts. We begin by introducing the reader to contemporary theories of self-regulation. We present a 4-phase model of self-regulating and a sparse literature on instructional design for SRL. Second, we build on this theory to describe features of CoNoteS2 (a prototype electronic notebook) that support self-regulation through tacit and explicit scaffolding. And finally, we describe the role of CoNoteS2 in researching about how students self-regulate their own learning. Our intent is to illustrate how contemporary learning theory can be used to drive instructional innovation and technological enhancement for the classroom.

Self-regulated learning (SRL) has become a pivotal construct in contemporary accounts of effective academic learning. I examine several areas of theory and empirical research, which are not prominently cited in educational psychology's research into SRL, that reveal new details of what SRL is and how students develop productive SRL. I interpret findings from these investigations to suggest that nondeliberative, knowledge-based elements are inherent in the processes of SRL, and in learning more generally. Several topics for future research are sketched based on an assumption that learning effectively by oneself will remain a goal of education and can be an especially revealing context in which to research SRL.

Six eminent educational psychologists raised significant issues about my hypotheses concerning inherent details in self-regulated learning (SRL). In this rejoinder, I address sewn broad questions: Is social interaction intrinsic to SRL? Do novices self-regulate learning? What is effort's role in SRL? What roles do goals play in SRL? How does SRL develop? What role does affect have in SRL? What can be done with models and principles? My answers to these questions are partial and provisional, pending further empirical studies, but they align with my initial theses that SRL (a) is inherent in learning, (b) is more alike than different from cognition in general, and (c) need not involve deliberation once procedural knowledge that comprises self-regulation has become thoroughly automated.

The study presents a simple and logical technique to display and quantify forest change using three dates of satellite imagery. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was computed for each date of imagery to define high and low vegetation biomass. Color composites were generated by combining each date of NDVI with either the red, green, or blue (RGB) image planes in an image display monitor. Harvest and regeneration areas were quantified by applying a modified parallelepiped classification creating an RGB-NDVI image with 27 classes that were grouped into nine major forest change categories. Aerial photographs and stand history maps are compared with the forest changes indicated by the RGB-NDVI image. The utility of the RGB-NDVI technique for supporting forest inventories and updating forest resource information systems are presented and discussed.

Introduction Study skills instruction in higher education has become increasingly popular in the past decade. Many universities and colleges have developed short courses to teach study skills, established learning resource centers, instituted counseling programs, and offered workshops focusing on study skills. An increasingly common venue embeds study skills instruction within a full-semester formal course, "University 101," that aims to ease high-school students' transition to university life. It is not coincidental that study skills are receiving increased attention in postsecondary education. Whereas universities and colleges once rigorously screened and selectively admitted candidates, they now face a need to balance the costs of sustaining quality teaching in the face of major budget cuts and potentially reduced enrollments (McKeachie, 1988). Students now pay a larger proportion of direct costs for their postsecondary education, and in turn they are justified in holding universities and colleges accountable for services they purchase. Furthermore, as institutions orient toward serving mature students who have been away from school for a number of years and students who are challenged in their pursuits of higher learning, there are increased needs to support students as they strive to cope with the academic demands of higher education. In this climate, we suggest that higher education should not merely teach students knowledge in curricular subjects such as history, chemistry, and sociology. Institutions also should provide means for students to develop adaptable strategies with which to pursue knowledge and solve problems during and after postsecondary experiences. Having such skills contributes abilities and the motivation necessary for lifelong learning. Early Investigations of Studying In the late 1970s and early 1980s researchers began to probe how postsecondary students studied and to explore factors that correlated with more effective approaches to studying. In innovative articles, Biggs (1978), Dahlgren and Marton (1978), Ramsden and Entwistle (1981) surveyed students and correlated their reports about how they studied with measures of achievement; personality factors, such as locus of control; and various situational variables, such as college major, attributes of how course grades were assigned, and workload. A theme these studies shared was that a particular form of cognitive engagement, called deep processing, correlated with more vigorous and apparently effective studying. Deep processing is a collection of separable studying tactics that articulate basic cognitive operations to build meaningful and coherent structures of knowledge. Specific tactics that lead to deep processing include retrieving related concepts and ideas relevant to material currently being studied, monitoring relationships between new information and prior knowledge, assembling propositions into elaborated structures, rehearsing and transforming information into meaningful schemata, and metacognitively monitoring and adapting learning tactics according to the requirements of a task (Winne, 1985). Paralleling such surveys of students' studying were a growing number of proposals that students be taught studying methods that could support deeper processing of course materials. Perhaps the most well known of these is Robinson's (1946) SQ3R - survey an assignment, generate questions, read, recite answers to questions, and review answers in relation to the text. Such apparently useful approaches to studying were widely proposed, but these suggestions were unfounded. Summarizing research prior to 1980, Johns and McNamara (1980, p. 1) concluded that "support for SQ3R is based more on opinion than on empirical fact." Our search of the literature since this review was published found just four empirical investigations (Chastain & Thurber, 1989; Graham, 1982; McCormick & Cooper, 1991; Schumaker, 1982). …