Appraisal

The purpose of this study was to understand the nature of human resource management (HRM) practices and study the concept of organizational culture in the midscale and upscale hotel organizations. Thus, the main theme of this study was an executive-level position in the HRM department/division of the hotel which included detailed examination on (1) the five different types of HRM practices such as HR planning, staffing, training and development, appraisal, and compensation; and (2) the three elements of organizational culture such as employee relations, creativity/risk-taking, and efficiency/pride emphasis. The next part determines the extent of association between the HRM practices and the organization's culture orientation. The number of hotel organisations included in the study was 50 hotels selected midscale and upscale hotels in the Klang Valley. The findings from this research indicate that overall HRM practices were found to be mixed with some inclination towards meeting current requirements whilst some were more geared towards future requirements. The organisation's culture orientation was relatively open and in support of employee-management relationships, some organizational support for employees' creativity and risk-taking activities, and employees' pride with their organizations

We propose a Theory of Challenge and Threat States in Athletes (TCTSA) which
is an amalgamation and extension of the biopsychosocial model of challenge and
threat, the model of adaptive approaches to competition and the debilitative and
facilitative competitive state anxiety model. In the TCTSA we posit that selfefficacy,
perceptions of control, and achievement goals determine challenge or
threat states in response to competition. Distinct patterns of neuroendocrine and
cardiovascular responses are indicative of a challenge or threat state. Increases in
epinephrine and cardiac activity, and a decrease in total peripheral vascular
resistance (TPR) characterise a challenge state and increases in cortisol, smaller
increases in cardiac activity and either no change or an increase in TPR
characterise a threat state. Positive and negative emotions can occur in a challenge
state while a threat state is associated with negative emotions only. Emotions are
perceived as helpful to performance in a challenge state but not in a threat state.
Challenge and threat states influence effort, attention, decision
making and
physical functioning and accordingly sport performance. The TCTSA provides a
framework for practitioners to enhance performance, through developing a
challenge state, and encourages researchers to explore the mechanisms underlying
performance in competition

This paper reviews accessibility concepts and illustrates the use and abuse of these within UK practice. No single organisation is responsible for accessibility, but measures of access are used as a shared language to allow passenger transport service providers to communicate effectively with transport users and non transport service providers. The use and abuse of measures is derived from how effectively the indicators are used to support effective communication, or confusion, between people, places and service provision.Using accessibility measures as the basis for dialogue and action, transport authorities and community partners are increasingly managing the organisational networks to facilitate access for people, adding a stronger human dimension to transport planning, and complementing well established roles managing physical passenger transport networks. The flexibility offered within accessibility planning continues to be abused, and many authorities have yet to find an optimal balance in the range, choice and calculation approach for indicators.

With the view to raising the effectiveness of Estonian educational system, new course concerning schools' and pupils' individual development must be taken. It can be achieved through performance management, which also generates the need to appraise schools' and teachers' performance. The purpose of this article is to bring out the opportunities for appraising schools' and teachers' performance in Estonian general education schools in a perspective of organizational culture and educational policy. On the assumption of teachers' main activities the authors grouped evaluation criteria into activities connected to school management and activities connected to educational process. Teachers' appraisal criteria a brought out in three main themes: teachers' personal characteristics, learning process and learning environment and school management and development. The authors also debate over the Estonian educational policy.

This chapter presents an account of an angrily virtuous, or patient, person informed by research on emotion in empirical and philosophical psychology. It is argued that virtue for anger is determined by excellence and deficiency with respect to all three of anger’s psychological functions: appraisal, motivation, and communication. Many competing accounts of virtue for anger assess it by attention to just one function; it is argued that singular evaluations of a person’s anger will ignore important dimensions of anger that bear on virtue and vice. Thus, possessing excellence with respect to only one function of anger is insufficient for virtue. The account is also extended to the characteristic vices of anger: wrath and meekness.

There is no doubt that various scholarly studies were carried out on Development in Nigeria; there are still gaps to be filled. This is due to the fact that scholars tend to generally concentrate on the study of aspects of Development and the history of poverty in Nigeria. The paper therefore provided in sight on the gaps left on touched by scholars with a view to proffering space for this work in previous works. Specifically, the paper seeks to give a critical appraisal of theories of development with particular reference to Nigeria. To achieve this, the paper is divided into sections on introduction / conceptual clarification of the key concept (development), highlights on the types of development. Discussion in this section leads to the spine of the paper which is a critical appraisal of development theories where theories such as (the Functionalist, Marxist, Modernization, Dependency and World system) were critically appraised. The paper is premised on the three fundamental ques...

Title. Living with chronic heart failure: a review of qualitative studies of older peopleAim.  This paper is a report of a systematic review of qualitative studies of how older people live with chronic heart failure.Background.  Chronic heart failure is a global epidemic mainly affecting an ageing population. Understanding how older people live with this disease is important to help promote their adjustment to the distressing illness experience.Data sources.  Eligible studies published in 1997–2007 were identified from several databases (Medline, CINAHL, PsycINFO and Sociological Abstracts). A manual search was conducted of bibliographies of the identified studies and relevant journals.Review methods.  Two researchers independently reviewed the studies and extracted the data. Key concepts from the papers were compared for similarities and differences. The transactional model of stress was used to guide data synthesis.Findings.  Fourteen qualitative studies were identified. Most described the illness experiences of older people with chronic heart failure and associated coping strategies. There was some emerging work exploring the adjustment process. The findings indicated that living with chronic heart failure was characterized by distressing symptoms, compromised physical functioning, feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness, and social and role dysfunction. There were gender differences in the way the disease was conceived. Adjustment required patients to make sense of the illness experience, accept the prognosis, and get on with living with the condition.Conclusion.  Empowering older people to manage chronic heart failure, instilling hope and bolstering support system are means of promoting successful adjustment to the disease. Further research needs to explore the cultural differences in the adjustment process.

Functional analysis has been incorporated widely into appraisal methods for decades. These methods, from documentation strategy to macroappraisal, are discussed, and the usefulness and limitations of functional analysis in appraisal are examined. Yet, while archival thinkers have focused on function in appraisal, little has been written on function in description, although it appears in the profession's standards. The influence of records management is evident in the description of institutional records using functional analysis, which are an increasing part of archival responsibility. Caution is needed, however, before we try to apply function as the principal descriptor to all our archival records.

Knowledge on primary processing of sound by the human auditory system has tremendously increased. This paper exploits the opportunities this creates for assessing the impact of (unwanted) environmental noise on quality of life of people. In particular the effect of auditory attention in a multisource context is focused on. The typical application envisaged here is characterized by very long term exposure (days) and multiple listeners (thousands) that need to be assessed. Therefore, the proposed model introduces many simplifications. The results obtained show that the approach is nevertheless capable of generating insight in the emergence of annoyance and the appraisal of open area soundscapes.

The lending record of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) has received little attention compared with HOLC’s residential security maps. Specifically, the extent to which HOLC practiced racial and ethnic discrimination in the process of making and servicing more than a million loans to homeowners during the Depression has not been carefully examined. Using primary sources including HOLC publications, newspaper articles, 1930 census data, and mortgage records from Philadelphia, this research shows that HOLC did make loans to African Americans, Jews, and immigrants. Evidence suggests, however, that HOLC supported racial segregation in the process of reselling properties acquired through foreclosure.

Performance appraisal plays significant role in lecturers' productivity. There is general opinion that the Nigerian university education is decaying in terms of the quality of its outputs, thus necessitating this study. The present study therefore investigated the relationship between performance appraisal criteria and lecturers' productivity in universities in southwest geo-political zone, Nigeria. Correlational survey method was employed for the study.The population of the study comprised all 4,991 lecturers of the five federal universities in southwest geo-political zone, Nigeria. Proportional sampling technique was used to select 1,360 lecturers from the five federal universities using Krejcie and Morgan (1970) sampling table. The study indicated that the level of lecturers' productivity in teaching in universities in Southwest geo-political zone, Nigeria is on the average; that level of lecturers' productivity in research in universities in Southwest geo-political zone, Nigeria is high; and that the level of lecturers' productivity in community service in universities in

Narrow minded skeptics in the twenty first century deny the existence of climate change and the resultant risks threatening the welfare of cities through the destruction of properties, displacement and environmental degradation. The global climate change concern is now more important than ever in the sub Saharan African region of West Africa where the vulnerabilities remain obvious. Accordingly, in the last several years, the lower West African region continues to be an epicenter of inclement weather hazards. For that, there exists mounting evidence of risks based on recurrent challenges triggered by surge in extreme climate parameters in the savannahs, the tropical moist areas and the coastal landscapes in Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Senegal. In these areas of the West Africa region, climate change parameters such as droughts, flooding, storm surge, and elevated temperature and greenhouse gas emissions continue to threaten the surrounding ecology. Just as climate hazards have captured the attention of various scholars in other areas, very little has been done to study the area despite its vulnerability to sea level rise, torrential rainfalls, coastal inundation and storm surge. In all these, the projected climate change trends point to continual dispersion of elevated temperature and evidence of harsh weather conditions all through the region. With the gravity of the hazards now obvious, this research fills that void in the literature, by analyzing climate change parameters threatening the study area with the use of mix scale methods of GIS, secondary data, and descriptive statistics with focus on the trends, factors, impacts and efforts of the institutions. Taking a cue from the analysis, the results show the prevalence of climate change risks and impacts in the form of flooding hazards, droughts, greenhouse gas emission, sea level rise, pollution, environmental degradation and displacement of citizens. With the impacts attributed to socioeconomic and physical elements, the GIS mapping reveals a gradual spreading of climate change hazards under different scales to various areas across the region from Nigeria to Senegal. To remedy the issue, the paper proffers some suggestions such as the need for adaptation, the design of efficient planning and policy in the region.

En este trabajo me propongo mostrar que es posible abordar el fenómeno emocional, atendiendo especialmente a los focos de conflicto entre cognitivistas y no cognitivistas, pero de un modo ligeramente distinto, sin buscar acomodar o subsumir el fenómeno emocional a partir de los estándares existentes, sino poniéndolos en duda. Específicamente, buscaré mostrar cómo ciertos conceptos adquieren nuevo significado en el del marco postcognitivista y permiten dar nuevas (y mejores) respuestas a viejos problemas. In this work my aim is to show that it is possible to approach emotions, paying special attention to the sources of conflict between cognitivists and non-cognitivists, but in a slightly different way, without seeking to accommodate the emotional phenomenon within the standards of cognitive science, but questioning them. Specifically, I will show how certain concepts acquire new meaning in the post-cognitive framework and allow new (and better) answers to old problems.

A major function of language is to enable the expression of interpersonal meanings - feelings, opinions, judgements, humour, and so on. Generally, however, this important aspect of language competency is not taught explicitly, possibly because such meanings are so deeply embedded in the culture that even native speakers are not consciously aware of how they employ these subtle resources. Drawing on the tools provided by appraisal theory, the paper considers the interpersonal demands made on English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D) students as they learn to write responses to popular media texts, in this case, Summer Heights High. While recognising the value of the informal give-and-take of adolescent online banter in such environments as YouTube and MySpace, ultimately students need to deal with the demands of more formal review writing in school. It proposes that students can make that transition with explicit guidance by teachers in using the kinds of evaluative langua...

A partir de situações relativamente recentes e polêmicas de disponibilização, na Internet (por meio do WikiLeaks), de grande volume de documentos sigilosos produzidos no âmbito de instâncias governamentais e referentes a diversos países, são discutidos aspectos históricos que envolvem o acesso à documentação arquivística de caráter público, sua utilização para a produção de conhecimento histórico e sua relevância para o exercício da cidadania e a consolidação de práticas democráticas. Aborda-se ainda, brevemente, o debate arquivístico acerca da avaliação de documentos de arquivo e sua relação com o tema do acesso aos arquivos.