Objective: To determine if undergraduate athletic training students enrolled in an athletic training education program (ATEP) and participating in a clinical assignment have burnout and if so, the possible causes. Design and Setting: All undergraduate athletic training students enrolled in a clinical education course were surveyed twice in an eight week period. The surveys were given during the fourth week and the twelfth week of the winter 2006 semester. As part of the survey, each participant also answered eight demographic/status questions for correlation purposes. Subjects: Fifty-one undergraduate athletic training students in a western United States university's accredited ATEP served as subjects for this study. Measurements: Data was analyzed using analysis of covariance with categorical independent variables and continuous covariants. Emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization (DP), and personal accomplishment (PA) were scored in accordance with the MBI-HSS. Post hoc testing was done when interactions/effects were significant at the p = .05 level. Dependent variables consisted of the three subsets of burnout (EE, DP, and PA). Results: Overall mean scores demonstrated a moderate level (17.0) of EE, low levels (5.7) of DP, and moderate level (38.0) of PA. Fourth (+) semester students reported high DP levels (13.3) and high levels of EE (30.9). Semester effect (p = pre- 0.0001; post- 0.007), marital/serious relationship status by gender interaction (p = pre- 0.008; post- 0.02) and semester by gender interaction (p = pre- 0.0017; post- 0.005) all had an effect on EE for both testing times. For DP, marital/serious relationship status by semester interaction (p = pre- 0.0121; post- 0.003), semester (p = pre- 0.0001; post- 0.0003), and semester by gender interaction (p = pre- 0.0001; post- 0.0001) were significant interactions/effects for both pre and post-tests. Conclusions: This study showed that with moderate PA, low DP, and moderate EE undergraduate athletic training students, demonstrated a moderate degree of burnout from their clinical assignments. The expectations of the ATEP appear to have a cumulative effect which is evidenced in the fourth (+) semester showing a high/average degree of burnout.

Det finns lärare som planerar sin undervisning utan att undersöka hur effektiv den är i att komma till rätta med studenternas missuppfattningar. En lärare som vet vilka missuppfattningar som är vanliga och leder till felaktiga svar tror jag har större möjlighet att utforma undervisningen på ett sätt som får eleverna att göra sig av med sina missuppfattningar och därmed svara rätt. Syftet med detta examensarbete var att undersöka hur gymnasieelever i början av tredje årskursen på det naturvetenskapliga programmet uppfattar biologiska begrepp. Verktyget som användes för att undersöka elevernas begreppsuppfattning var Biology Concept Inventory (BCI). Testet besvarades av 66 svenska gymnasieelever i sista året på det naturvetenskapliga programmet. Resultatet från de svenska eleverna jämfördes med resultatet från 85 gymnasieelever i USA. Resultaten från båda länderna visar att många elever väljer bort alternativ där biologiska processer innehåller slump och hellre väljer alternativ som innebär att den biologiska processen styrs av en drivkraft som till exempel det naturliga urvalet eller en koncentrationsgradient. Användningsområden och begränsningar hos BCI diskuteras. Förslag ges till förändrad undervisning och vidare forskning. / There are teachers who plan their teaching without examining its effectiveness in overcoming students’ misconceptions. I think that a teacher who knows what misconceptions are common and lead to wrong answers has a better chance to develop their teaching in a way that will allow students to get rid of their misconceptions and hence choose correct answers. The purpose of the present study was to examine concept understanding in biology of Swedish high school students at the beginning of the final year of the science program. The tool used to explore students’ concept understanding was the Biology Concept Inventory (BCI). The test was answered by 66 Swedish high school students in the final year of the science program. The results from the Swedish students were compared to the results from 85 high school students in the United States. The results from both countries show that many students avoid alternatives in which a biological process include randomness and prefer to choose alternatives which means that the biological process is controlled by a driving force, for instance natural selection or a concentration gradient. Applications and limitations of the BCI are discussed. Suggestions for changes in education and further research are given.

Natural disasters, specifically hurricanes, can cause catastrophic loss of life and property. In recent years, the United States has endured significant losses due to a series of devastating hurricanes (e.g., Hurricanes Charley and Ivan in 2004, and Hurricanes Katrina and Wilma in 2005). Several Federal authorities report that there are weaknesses in the emergency and disaster planning and response models that are currently employed in practice, thus creating a need for better decision models in emergency situations. The current models not only lack fast communication with emergency responders and the public, but are also inadequate for advising the pre-positioning of supplies at emergency shelters before the storm's impact. The problem of emergency evacuation relief shelter planning during anticipated hurricane events is addressed in this research. The shelter planning problem is modeled as a joint location-allocation-inventory problem, where the number and location of shelter facilities must be identified. In addition, the evacuating citizens must be assigned to the designated shelter facilities, and the amount of emergency supply inventory to pre-position at each facility must be determined. The objective is to minimize total emergency evacuation costs, which is equal to the combined facility opening and preparation cost, evacuee transportation cost and emergency supply inventory cost. A review of the emergency evacuation planning literature reveals that this class of problems has not been largely addressed to date. First, the emergency evacuation relief sheltering problem is formulated under deterministic conditions as a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) model. For three different evacuation scenarios, the proposed MINLP model yields a plan that identifies the locations of relief shelters for evacuees, the assignment of evacuees to those shelters and the amount of emergency supplies to stockpile in advance of an anticipated hurricane. The MINLP model is then used (with minor modifications) to explore the idea of equally distributing the evacuees across the open shelters. The results for the three different scenarios indicate that a balanced utilization of the open shelters is achieved with little increase in the total evacuation cost. Next, the MINLP is enhanced to consider the stochastic characteristics of both hurricane strength and projected trajectory, which can directly influence the storm's behavior. The hurricane's strength is based on its hurricane category according to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. Its trajectory is represented as a Markov chain, where the storm's path is modeled as transitions among states (i.e., coordinate locations) within a spherical coordinate system. A specific hurricane that made landfall in the state of Florida is used as a test case for the model. Finally, the stochastic model is employed within a robust optimization strategy, where several probable hurricane behavioral scenarios are solved. Then, a single, robust evacuation sheltering plan that provides the best results, not only in terms of maximum deviation of total evacuation cost across the likely scenarios, but also in terms of maximum deviation of unmet evacuee demand at the shelter locations, is generated. The practical value of this robust plan is quite significant. This plan should accommodate unexpected changes in the behavior of an approaching storm to a reasonable degree with minimal negative impact to the total evacuation cost and the fulfillment of evacuee demand at the shelter locations. Most importantly, the re-allocation and re-mobilization of emergency personnel and supplies are not required, which can cause confusion and potentially increase the response time of responders to the hurricane emergency. The computational results show the promise of this research and usefulness of the proposed models. This work is an initial step in addressing the simultaneous identification of shelter locations, assignment of citizens to those shelters, and determination of a policy for stockpiling emergency supplies in advance of a hurricane. Both the location-allocation problem and the inventory problem have been extensively and individually studied by researchers as well as practitioners. However, this joint location-allocation-inventory problem is a difficult problem to solve, especially in the presence of stochastic storm behavior. The proposed models, even in the deterministic case, are a significant step beyond the current state-of-the-art in the area of emergency and disaster planning.

Gender is a socially derived construct that is taught and understood at young ages. However, not every individual has the same social skills to understand these seen and unseen social cues about gender. The Bem Sex-Role Inventory was given to adult individuals with autism in the United States to better understand their masculine, feminine, and androgenous perceptions. These data were then compared to the original Bem Sex-Role Inventory general population study to see if there were any differences. The data show that males with autism had lower masculine scores and higher feminine scores than males in the general population. Females with autism had no differences compared to females in the general population. The age of gender identification was also collected and showed no major differences to gender identity formation; however, some suggestion can be made that older individuals may perceive their age of gender identity differently than younger individuals. The implications of this allow future research to focus on how masculinity and femininity traits are socially taught among young children.

In this dissertation, we study inventory and revenue management problems for perishable products with customer choice considerations. This dissertation is composed of six chapters. In Chapter 1, we provide an overview and the motivation of problems. Subsequently, in Chapter 2, we propose a joint inventory and pricing problem for a perishable product with two freshness levels. After a stochastic time, a fresh item turns into a non-fresh item, which will expire after another random duration. Under an (r, Q) ordering policy and a markdown pricing strategy for non-fresh items, we formulate a model that maximizes the long-run average profit rate. We then reduce the model to a mixed-integer bilinear program (MIBLP), which can be solved efficiently by state-of-the-art commercial solvers. We also investigate the value of using a markdown strategy by establishing bounds on it under limiting regimes of some parameters such as large market demand. Further, we consider an Economic Order Quantity (EOQ)-type heuristic and bound the optimality gap asymptotically. Our results reveal that although the clearance strategy is always beneficial for the retailer, it may hurt customers who are willing to buy fresh products. In Chapter 3, we extend this model to the dynamic setting with multiple freshness levels of perishable products. Due to the complexity of the problem, we study the structural properties of value function and characterize the structure of the optimal policies by using the concept of anti-multimodularity. The structural analysis enables us to devise three novel and efficient heuristic policies. We further extend the model by considering donation policy and replenishment system. Our results imply that freshness-dependent pricing and dynamic pricing are two substitute strategies, while freshness-dependent pricing and donation strategy are two complement strategies for matching supply with demand. Also, high variability in product quality under dynamic pricing benefits the firm, but it may result in significant losses with a static pricing strategy. In Chapter 4, we study a joint inventory-pricing model for perishable items with fixed shelf lives to examine the effectiveness of different markdown policies, including single-stage, multiple-stage, and dynamic markdown policies both theoretically and numerically. We show that the value of multiple-stage markdown policies over single-stage ones asymptotically vanishes as the shelf life, market demand, or customers’ maximum willingness-to-pay increase. In chapter 5, with a focus on blood products, we optimize blood supply chain structure along with the operations optimization. Specifically, we study collection, production, replenishment, issuing, inventory, wastage, and substitution decisions under three different blood supply chain channel structures, i.e., the decentralized, centralized, and coordinated. We propose a bi-level optimization program to model the decentralized system and use the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions to solve that. Although centralized systems result in a higher performance than decentralized systems, it is challenging to implement them. Thus, we design a novel coordination mechanism to motivate hospitals to operate in a centralized system. We also extend the model to the case with demand uncertainty and compare different issuing and replenishment policies. Analysis of a realistic case-study indicates that integration can significantly improve the performance of the system. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes this dissertation and proposes future research directions. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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No description available.

Klimatförändringen är en viktigt fråga som kräver insatser inom flera sektorer för att hållbara nivåer på växthusutsläppen ska kunna nås. En av dessa sektorer är livsmedelsindustrin där konsumtionen av livsmedel för en genomsnittlig svensk konsument utgör ca 25 % av de totala utsläppen. En förbättringsmöjlighet inom detta område är minskning av matsvinn. Denna studie fokuserar på hur ökad medvetenhet kring sitt inventarie av livsmedel inom hushåll kan bidra till minskat matsvinn samt hur man på bästa sätt kan designa ett system i detta syfte. För studien utvecklades ett digitalt inventariesystem i form av en uppkopplad skanner för inläsning av streckkoder samt en webbapplikation anpassad till mobila enheter där det aktuella inventariet presenteras tillsammans med en inköpslista. En testgrupp på åtta stycken deltagare fördelat på fyra hushåll fick under en två veckors lång period använda systemet. Efter studien fick de även delta på en intervju om deras upplevelse av- och motivation till att använda systemet, där kvalitativ data samlades in. Den grundläggande teorin bakom studien består primärt av The Behaviour Change Wheel som användes under designprocessen för det framtagna systemet då systemet skulle kräva en beteendeförändring. Resultatet visade en positiv inställning till systemet, där alla medverkande testpersoner ansåg att systemet skulle kunna bidra till minskat matsvinn i hushållen. Resultatet visade även att systemet underlättade kunskapsökning kring användarens inventarie av livsmedel. Det nya beteendet övergick till rutin hos majoriteten av testpersonerna och även fast en del nya funktioner och förbättringar önskades, kunde även majoriteten tänka sig att använda systemet i efterhand. Denna studie är dock i sig för kort för att kunna dra några konkreta slutsatser kring de bestående beteendeförändringar till användningen av systemet. / The climate change is an important issue that requires efforts in several sectors in order to achieve sustainable levels of greenhouse emissions. One of these sectors is the food industry, where the consumption of food for an average Swedish consumer constitutes about 25 % of the total emissions. An opportunity for improvement in this area is the reduction of food waste. This study focuses on how increased awareness of their inventory of household food can contribute to reduced food waste and how to best design a system for this purpose. For the study, a digital inventory system was developed in the form of a barcode scanner and a web application adapted to mobile units where the current inventory is presented together with a shopping list. A test group of eight participants divided into four households received a system during a two-week period. After the study, they also had to attend an interview about their experience of motivation to use the system, where qualitative data was collected. The basic theory behind the study consists primarily of The Behavior Change Wheel which was used during the design process of the system that were developed, since the system would require a behavioral change. The result showed a positive attitude towards the system, where all participating test persons considered that the system could contribute to reduced food waste in households. The result also showed that the system facilitated knowledge raising around the user's food inventory. The new behavior changed to routine with the majority of the test persons and even though some new functions and improvements were desired, the majority could also imagine using the system afterwards. However, this study is in itself too short to be able to draw any concrete conclusions about the permanent behavioral changes to the use of the system. / Smarta förvaringslösningar i framtidens kylskåp för minskat matsvinn

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In collaboration with the Sam D. Hamilton Noxubee National Wildlife Refuge, I collected detailed information on the butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea Latreille, 1802) of the refuge. I produced a comprehensive checklist of butterflies and skippers numbering 60 species. In addition, I collected data on flight periods as well as local plant community associations. Butterfly abundance surveys were conducted to assess seasonal habitat use across six site classes. Special emphasis was placed on pine forest at various stages of management for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker (Picoides borealis). An exploratory analysis of butterfly diversity and abundance was conducted using non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS). Using a Pearson correlation, I determined that butterfly species richness correlated positively with understory plant morphospecies richness across site classes. A correlation was not found for data solely collected from the pine sites, suggesting factors other than understory morphospecies richness govern butterfly richness within a site class.