The present study explores the individual and university supports of U.S. international students during their job searches. Twenty-eight international students (93% Asian, 7% African; 57% female) ...from a U.S. Midwest public university participated in one-on-one semi-structured interviews in Spring 2021 regarding their U.S. job search experiences. All 28 participants (64% graduate students) were within one year of their graduation date. A transcendental phenomenological approach was employed to conduct a thematic analysis. Lower-order themes that significantly contributed to international students’ successful job searches in the US were organized into individual and institutional-level supports and collated into six key themes: (a) early planning for post-graduation; (b) networking; (c) in-demand majors and degree levels; (d) university-industry connections; (e) personalized department support; and (f) campus career services. Based on these findings, several implications for career development research, theory, and practice are discussed.
Open government data has become an important movement for government administrations around the world. Nevertheless, government agencies tend not to open their datasets and can act reluctantly to ...embed the concept of data publication in their daily operations. Accordingly, this study examines the determinants that are argued to have influences on the government agencies' intention and behavior of open data publication. Relevant hypotheses are developed through literature review to form a preliminary research model, and respective influences of the determinants on the government agencies' intention and behavior to publish datasets are statistically tested. The empirical results show that the determinants account for 60.4% of the variance in agencies' intention and 54.2% of the variance in agencies' behavior. All the determinants are statistically significant except for perceived effort and perceived benefits. Specifically, facilitating conditions and organizational capability are the two factors having the strongest positive effect. Perceived usefulness, external influence, and organizational culture also have positive influences while perceived risks indeed incur a negative impact on the intention. On the contrary, perceived effort and perceived benefits are found to be insignificant. Lastly, intention is statistically significant and indeed acts as a strong antecedent to predict government agencies' activities of open data publication. Practical implications are also offered to practitioners. A designated government agency should act as the coordinator to help agencies obtain facilitations from others. Agencies' concern of data misuse should be mitigated, as it is found to be the major driver having a negative impact. The limitations and future research directions are also discussed. The findings and discussions of this study are expected to contribute to the current open data literature.
•The influential factors of open data publication are examined and discussed.•Facilitating condition and organizational capability are the two major drivers.•Perceived usefulness, external influence, and culture also have positive influences.•Perceived risks incur a negative impact while data misuse weighs the most.•Perceived effort and perceived benefits are not found to be significant in the study.
This research aims to explore the relationships between gender, educational attainment, and job quality, including work autonomy, work intensity, and job satisfaction across Germany, Sweden, and the ...UK. The European Working Conditions Survey 2015 was used to achieve this research objective. Descriptive statistics and multivariate regression analysis were used to determine how educational level plays an important role in creating gender differences in job quality across three countries. The findings show that receiving postsecondary education can improve work autonomy for both German and Swedish women. However, postsecondary education has different impacts on gender gaps in job quality in these countries. While postsecondary education lowers the gender gap in work autonomy and intensity in Sweden, postsecondary education increases the gender gap in work autonomy and intensity in Germany. Postsecondary education does not significantly decrease gender differences in job satisfaction in Germany or Sweden or any of our job quality measures in the UK. These findings challenge the commonly held belief that higher education has a positive effect on job quality. In fact, gender norms and national institutional factors may also play important roles in this relationship.
Patients with ischemic heart disease (IHD) are more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer. Statins, which are widely used in such patients, are shown to modify the risk of prostate cancer. To ...clarify the association between statin use and the risk of prostate cancer among patients with higher risk of developing prostate cancer in Taiwan, a cohort of 26,628 men with IHD and aged between 55 and 100 were acquired from the National Health Insurance Research Database and followed over a period of 8 years. The risk of prostate cancer was calculated by time‐dependent Cox regression model. Statin use was associated with significantly lower risk of both total and advanced prostate cancer (adjusted hazard ratio (HR): 0.719, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.570–0.908; adjusted HR: 0.718, 95% CI: 0.530–0.972 respectively). In Taiwan IHD population, the reduction in risk of prostate cancer was observed in statin users as compared with nonusers.
Queue dissipation has been extensively studied about traffic signalization, work zone operations, and ramp metering. Various methods for estimating the intersection's queue length and dissipation ...time have been reported in the literature, including the use of car-following models with simulation, vehicle trajectories from GPS, shock-wave theory, statistical estimation from traffic flow patterns, and artificial neural networks (ANN). However, most of such methods cannot account for the impacts of interactions between different vehicle types and their spatial distributions in the queue length on the initial discharge time and the resulting total dissipation duration. As such, this study presents a system, named TrafficTalk, that applies a deep learning-based method to reliably capture the queue characteristics of mixed traffic flows, and produce a robust estimate of the dissipating duration for the design of the optimal signal plan. The proposed TrafficTalk, featuring the effectiveness in transforming video-imaged traffic conditions into vehicle density maps, has proved its performance under extensive field evaluations. For instance, compared with the benchmark model, XGBoost in the literature, it has reduced the MAPE from 25.8% to 10.4%., and from 31.3% to 10.4% if the queue discharging stream comprises motorcycles.
In recent years, more and more government administrations around the world are participating in open data policy implementation. Government officials who are charged with implementing this new policy ...usually need to look for related information for deciding what datasets to open to the public. Accordingly, a research gap exists in understanding government officials' information behaviors in implementing open data policy. By using a qualitative approach to conduct semi-structured interviews with government officials who have extensive experience in implementing open data policy, this study explores government officials' information behaviors in searching and selecting datasets for open data publication. Specifically, this research investigates government officials' information needs, the employed information sources, and the intervening variables that influence their information behaviors. While open data is an ongoing policy implementation, government officials' information behaviors form an iterative cycle where information needs continually occur, information seeking activities are conducted by using a variety of information sources, and the obtained information is used to satisfy information needs. The findings and discussions of this study are expected to provide insights of government officials' data search and selection to practitioners and to enrich the current literature of open government data.
•Government officials' information behaviors in implementing open data policy are explored.•Information needs and related internal and external drivers are identified.•Types of adopted information sources and criteria of selection are presented.•Intervening variables influencing information behaviors are discussed.
The past ten years have witnessed a tremendous increase in the number of online courses, and the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly accelerated online education. Many students and instructors were unprepared ...for online learning. In particular, online learners are expected to employ self-directed learning (SDL) skills to succeed. This qualitative study examined students’ SDL strategies and satisfaction in online courses. The researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 graduate students taking online courses and analyzed the data using thematic analysis. The results provide several important insights. First, students’ entering motivation (e.g., interest in knowledge acquisition, the value of the course) and task motivation strategies (e.g., teaching presence, engaging in the course) played important roles in students’ SDL. Second, students employed diverse cognitive (e.g., critical reading, information seeking) and metacognitive strategies (e.g., reflection, assignments) to monitor their learning. Third, students leveraged time-management and resource management strategies (e.g., making specific schedules). Fourth, students’ satisfaction depended on the course design (e.g., well-structured organization) and instructional approaches (e.g., teaching presence). The implications of the study for online instructors and instructional designers are discussed.
This paper explores how information is shared across the vertical and horizontal boundaries of government agencies. Different types of information sharing are identified and discussed in terms of ...their strengths and encountered challenges. Centralized types of information sharing are found as a primary strategy adopted to facilitate interagency information sharing in the two dimensions. Particularly, influential determinants from type comparisons and government agencies are identified and discussed regarding what agencies may take into considerations when selecting certain types of information sharing. While there is no single type of information sharing that can satisfy all the needs and concerns of government agencies, most agencies still simultaneously employ several types of information sharing in different circumstances. A competition-and-cooperation relationship exists among the different types of information sharing in both dimensions. The paper suggests that a balance between centralized and decentralized types of information sharing should be achieved to obtain advantages and diminish disadvantages. The similarities and differences between the types in the two dimensions are also compared and discussed. Lastly, the conclusion outlines the contribution and limitation of the current research and suggests future studies of the current work.
•Centralized types of information sharing are found as a primary adopted strategy.•Types of information sharing in the vertical dimension are discussed.•Types of information sharing in the horizontal dimension are discussed.•A competition-and-cooperation relationship exists among the different types.•A balance between centralization and decentralization is discussed.
Students who learn evidence-based nursing can assist the healthcare team to make proper medical decisions and provide patients with valuable advice, thus optimizing the quality of patient care in ...specific situations. In clinical work, nursing staff members participate in decision making by searching for relevant empirical nursing literature, a basic ability required to enter clinical practice. In traditional instruction, nursing students are taught the Problem, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome method to learn to use library resources and gather empirical nursing knowledge for decision making. However, it is a challenge for most students to have sufficient practice to make decisions correctly and to have opportunities to perceive medical cases from diverse perspectives. Therefore, we propose a peer assessment-based Problem, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome approach to help nursing students locate correct evidence and make appropriate decisions about patient care. We performed an experiment with our approach in a nursing university training program. The experimental results reveal that the subjects learning with the proposed approach show better evidence-based nursing knowledge, learning attitude, and critical thinking ability than those learning with the traditional approach.
PDF
