Nice Work Research Articles

“Nice Work If You Can Get It”: Preparing for the Job Search in Rhetoric and Composition

“Nice Work If You Can Get It”: Preparing for the Job Search in Rhetoric and Composition

On Bicyclic Graphs with Maximal Graovac-Ghorbani Index

Graovac-Ghorbani index is a new version of the atom-bond connectivity index. D. Pacheco et al. [MATCH Commun. Math. Comput. Chem. 86 (2021) 429-448] conjectured a sharp lower and upper bounds to the Graovac-Ghorbani index for all bicyclic graphs. Motivated by their nice work, in this paper we determine the maximal Graovac-Ghorbani index of bicyclic graphs and characterize the corresponding extremal graphs, which solves one of their Conjectures.

Class and Education in David Lodge’s ‘Nice Work’ and Zadie Smith’s ‘On Beauty’

Class and Education in David Lodge’s ‘Nice Work’ and Zadie Smith’s ‘On Beauty’

Introduction: The New Campus Novel

IntroductionThe New Campus Novel Matthew Roberson (bio) On first glance, it seems easy enough to define the "campus novel" (which is as often called the academic novel). In many, maybe most cases, it's a comic, maybe satirical text that follows an alienated protagonist (who has, historically, been white and male) mired in and/or bounced around by any number of campus absurdities: department infighting, institutional rituals, budget agonies, bureaucratic nonsense, and so on. More often than not, this life at the college or university is complicated by petty antagonisms and/or romantic entanglements between colleagues, challenges offered by difficult campus characters (who are as likely to be students as professors), and, typically, confusingly shifting campus cultures and climates. Almost always, the conflicts emerging in this mix are vicious, as is often said, because the stakes are so small. Some campus novels have drawn a good bit of attention over the years. One of the first, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), set the stage for the campus novel by following the bumbles of a junior professor trying to make good in a hypocritical academic universe. Another early one, The Groves of Academe (1952), by Mary McCarthy, distinguished itself by offering a large range of campus characters, some of whom are genuinely—and not amusingly—unsavory. Years later, David Lodge's campus trilogy—Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), and Nice Work (1988)—put the campus novel on an international stage. Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985) turned the campus novel toward capturing and considering a larger American culture and cultural moment. Jane Smiley's Moo (1995) offered a Dickensian sprawl of eccentric and impassioned academics alongside a hefty dose of midwestern American agricultural studies. [End Page 9] here is an incomplete list of notable twentieth-century campus novels not mentioned above: Possession, A. S. Byatt Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon The Rules of Attraction, Bret Easton Ellis Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, Richard Fariña Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell The War between the Tates, Alison Lurie A New Life, Bernard Malamud Galatea 2.2, Richard Powers The Human Stain, Philip Roth Straight Man, Richard Russo The Secret History, Donna Tartt Stoner, John Williams In the twenty-first century, the campus novel continues to be written and read, and its tendencies have shifted enough that it deserves consideration as the new campus novel, as we're calling it. What distinguishes this new campus novel? For one thing, the new campus novel often centers on the experiences of graduate students, as is the case in several of the books reviewed in this issue: Brandon Taylor's Real Life (2020), Christine Smallwood's Life of the Mind (2021), and Tiphaine Rivière's Notes on a Thesis (2016). Why might this be the case? Is the graduate student experience now so often so extended that it merits treatment by a novel? Has it become more interestingly fraught than before? In the absence of (m)any new assistant professors across the United States, as tenure tracks dry up and up and up, has the graduate student become the more prominent downtrodden outsider trying to make it in academia? At the least, it seems likely that graduate students are prominent in the new campus novel because they more often represent new perspectives and identities in an institutional arrangement of tenure in which players, frankly, don't turn over with any great frequency. It's not in the bulge of established academics that we'll find many younger people, not to mention persons of [End Page 10] color, or find as many open differences in sexual and gender identities. It's in books like those by Taylor and Smallwood and Rivière that we see these points of view and their particular challenges represented—and not always with the traditional turn toward a comedic relief valve. Taylor's book, for example, is grimly serious, even stark sometimes (and, most atypically for this tradition, features a main character in the sciences, not the liberal arts). Even in those new campus novels where the central players are still professors (and administrators and campus staff), the hierarchies have changed; after all...

Nice work if you can get it: Labour market pathways of Belgian service voucher workers

Seen as an alternative to precarious, informal work or no job at all, several European countries have started to use tax money to boost the demand for domestic services. This article asks whether this makes sense. We consider the case of the heavily subsidized and highly popular service voucher scheme in Belgium. Close to a quarter of households there employ domestic service workers under the scheme, making it in relative terms the largest scheme of its kind in Europe. The workers employed under the scheme enjoy extensive labour and social security rights. Does the service voucher scheme provide a model to be followed if we care about labour market exclusion and precariousness or is this a case of institutionalized second-tier work? To that end we trace workers’ labour market pathways over a considerable length of time. We find that a substantial share of women find a way out of vulnerable labour market situations through the scheme. However, a very significant number enter from steady employment. This is clearly at odds with the original objective of offering a stepping stone to women with a precarious labour market position. The scheme also plays an ambivalent role in the labour market integration process of immigrant newcomers. At least in part, the Belgian scheme can be seen as a case of policy overshooting. We suggest some potential improvements.

Universal treatment of the reduction for one-loop integrals in a projective space

Recently a nice work about the understanding of one-loop integrals has been done in [1] using the tricks of the projective space language associated to their Feynman parametrization. We find this language is also very suitable to deal with the reduction problem of one-loop integrals with general tensor structures as well as propagators with arbitrary higher powers. In this paper, we show that how to combine Feynman parametrization and embedding formalism to give a universal treatment of reductions for general one-loop integrals, even including the degenerated cases, such as the vanishing Gram determinant. Results from this method can be written in a compact and symmetric form.

Discussion of signature‐based models of preventive maintenance

Discussion of signature‐based models of preventive maintenance

University Studies, Up Close and Critical

University Studies, Up Close and Critical Ben Chappell (bio) COMPLAINT! By Sara Ahmed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2021. THE ADJUNCT UNDER-CLASS: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission. By Herb Childress. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2019. BEYOND EDUCATION: Radical Studying for Another World. By Eli Meyerhoff. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2019. LEAN SEMESTERS: How Higher Education Reproduces Inequity. By Sekile M. Nzinga. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2020. [End Page 55] Over a couple of decades now, scholars in the emergent field of critical university studies have deployed the analytics of humanities and social science scholarship to take stock of their own profession and workplaces. This work contrasts with other public debates on the nature and purpose of higher education, whether those advancing “best practices” for accommodating changing social circumstances or issuing calls for large-scale, “disruptive” restructuring, both of which often proceed on the assumption that the limitations of the present and future sociopolitical contexts are to be simply taken for granted. The “critical” marker signifies instead a project that proceeds with the assumption that social relations can and ought to be changed. To that end, critical work holds universities up against their own lofty ambitions and claims in order to see, within the context of historical dynamics of hierarchy, what knowledge institutions are actually like. Much of this work has operated within an epochal frame, marking shifts in higher education such as the expanded access afforded by the G.I. Bill after World War II (Newfield 2007), or right-wing reaction to the diversification of student populations and attendant social movements in the 1960s (Ferguson 2017). Another critical impulse has manifested as an interest in how “post-social” tendencies of the neoliberal moment have reshaped knowledge institutions and exerted pressure on subjects trying to inhabit them (Brown 2015). As Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell (2018) have observed, a sizable portion of the critical university studies discourse joins in a “crisis consensus” about how university restructuring is ruining a profession that normally would be both good for society and nice work if you can get it. One version of this narrative is captured in the title of Benjamin Ginsberg’s 2011 book The Fall of the Faculty. Ginsberg sees the decline of academia in a loss of autonomy by intellectuals, brought on by an observable “administrative turn” in university organization, neoliberal priorities in budgeting and accounting, and managerialism that takes for granted the aim of “running it like a business.” Yasmin Nair (2014) has critiqued the “class shock” evident in some of these takes as being invested in the fantasy of a certain bourgeois intellectual lifestyle that is not widely possible, and perhaps never has been without the support of unpaid and invisible labor (for example, provided by “professors’ wives” and others not recognized themselves as intellectuals, but who kept the whole ship afloat). Many if not most scholars may recognize their own experiences in these sweeping accounts, but what are those experiences like? Several recent books enrich this conversation by drawing at least partly on interviews to ground their analyses of the fraught landscape of higher education. The result is a dire picture of the cost to individuals who carry on intellectual work despite the harm that can result from their commitment. Close attention to the human effect of the current state and circumstances of universities reinforces the necessity of a critical approach, demonstrating that there is little to be taken for granted, and much that needs to change. [End Page 56] In a book examined more extensively below, Eli Meyerhoff argues that left-wing critiques of university restructuring fall short by maintaining an attachment to what Meyerhoff considers the “romance” of education. This attachment is evident in various genres of narrating the crisis consensus, including jeremiad, a linear narrative of fall from a more pure or authentic past into the current, diminished state, and melodrama, a narrative of villains and heroes. Ginsberg’s book referenced above shows how these narratives can be combined, but in The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission, Herb Childress avoids naming villains by describing the...

Sincerely Luther: Narrative Letters of the Great Reformer by Neal E. Snider

Reviewed by: Sincerely Luther: Narrative Letters of the Great Reformer by Neal E. Snider Mark D. Tranvik Sincerely Luther: Narrative Letters of the Great Reformer. By Neal E. Snider. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing, 2019. 304 pp. As readers of this journal know, Martin Luther is among the most written-about figures in human history. Novel approaches to his life [End Page 224] and thought are rare, but Neal Snider's book opens a fresh path. The author, tongue in cheek, has claimed to receive 110 "letters" from Luther from beyond the grave. By means of this correspondence, Snider, a retired Lutheran pastor who is extremely well read in the works of the reformer, provides his readers an overview of Luther's life and theology. The result is an imaginative blend of biography, theology, and history with a bit of whimsy mixed in. The first thing I checked in this book was the author's grasp of Luther's profound and tension-filled theology. I am happy to report that Snider has done a fine job of exploring some of Luther's most complicated topics. He handles the gradual "conversion" of the reformer with nuance and subtlety. His summary of the Heidelberg Disputation and the theology of the cross is illuminating. He also does nice work explaining Luther's sacramental theology and the changing contexts that led the reformer to accent the promise in his early career and then underline the value of the element in later life. In Letter 91 he tackles the famous 1525 debate on free will with the humanist Erasmus. I particularly enjoyed Snider's account of Luther's views on the bondage of the will: "Consider the implication of affirming free will in relation to God. If you have a free will, then God is in your hands; He awaits a decision from you. Don't you see the blasphemy? God is at your disposal; you can accept Him and His promises or reject the same. In either case, you are in control of God" (243). That is a fine summation of Luther's argument. Snider also does not duck the troubling writings in Luther's works. There are letters covering his responses to the Peasants' Rebellion as well as one that deals with his hate-filled remarks concerning the Jews. While the author clearly loves his subject, this is not hagiography. Moreover, Snider's eye is clearly on the world of the parish pastor. He devotes moving letters to the topics of marriage, suffering, the struggle of prayer, and the trials of preaching. Throughout the text the reader can detect the experiences of one who has struggled on Saturday nights with sermons, prayed next to many bedsides, and officiated at countless funerals. A few items are missing that might have made this book stronger. It could use an index and a chronology, since those unfamiliar with Luther's life and teaching need such aids to fully comprehend the [End Page 225] reformer. Also, the accent here is clearly on the early Luther. The later Luther is also a fascinating figure but the references to the 1530s and 1540s are brief. Finally, one could get the impression from Snider's book that Luther was a solitary figure leading the charge of reform. References to the wider "Wittenberg movement," as it is known today, would have shown the reformer's dependence on a remarkable community of scholars and preachers. None of these criticisms should obscure Snider's accomplishment. This is an imaginative book that sparkles with insight. It clearly comes from one who has been captivated by the life and theology of Martin Luther and who has sought to pass along his reforming spirit to twenty-first century readers. Mark D. Tranvik Luther Seminary St. Paul, Minnesota Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Collaborative studies of U.S.-China neurologists on acute motor axonal neuropathy.

Collaborative studies of U.S.-China neurologists on acute motor axonal neuropathy.

The Impact of Motivation and Environment on Employee Performance with Organizational Commitment as Intervening Variable

Employee performance is the result achieved by the employee in completing the work assigned by the company to the employee. The inconsistencies of previous research and also overlooking the chance that organizational commitment may act as intervening variable is the problem that this research highlight. The purpose of the study was to test the effect of work motivation and work environment on employee performance with organizational commitment as an intervening variable. This type of research is causal-quantitative research. Saturation sampling was used in this research. 110 employees of PT Abioso Batara Alba, Boyolali Regency, as the sample. Data collection techniques in this study using a questionnaire. The hypothesis testing technique is in the form of path analysis using SPSS version 20 and the Sobel test. The results showed that work motivation had an effect on employee performance. Organizational commitment does not mediate the effect of work motivation on employee performance. Good work motivation will increase employee performance. The work environment has an effect on employee performance. Organizational commitment does not mediate the effect of the work environment on employee performance. Employee performance will improve if they are motivated at work. Employees do not need to be devoted to the firm to increase performance because the company's good work motivation will directly improve employee performance. Employees do not need to be dedicated to the company first in order for the construction of a nice work environment to have a direct impact on employee performance.

From the nice work to the hard work: “Troubling” community‐based CareMongering during the COVID‐19 pandemic

AbstractCareMongering is a virtually organized community‐based response to COVID‐19 formed in Canada in March 2020, in response to growing concerns about the pandemic. The goal of CareMongering is to care for community members, particularly those experiencing social exclusion, by organizing groups at a local level to support access to basic necessities, services, and resources (e.g., providing groceries and childcare to frontline workers). Following from feminist calls to “trouble” care, we explore the uncomfortable relations that emerged while practicing CareMongering through a case study of a group in Ontario, Canada. Using semi‐structured interviews with group members and organizers and ethnographic content analysis of Facebook group activity, we examine (1) difficult interactions on the group's public Facebook page, (2) strategies used to moderate the group, and (3) the affective and embodied experiences involved in virtually organizing CareMongering. We illustrate our findings through vignettes of one of the author's experiences as a CareMongering group member and composite narratives of social media interactions. We argue that by enacting critical community care, CareMongering groups have the potential to practice care that goes beyond simply caring for or about community needs to also care with communities. The hard work of critical community care involves an intersectional, reflexive, and relational approach that addresses underlying inequalities and promotes actions aimed toward making structural and collective change.

Goodness-of-fit tests for Markov Switching VAR models using spectral analysis

We consider a vector autoregressive (VAR) model subject to Markov Switching and present results for testing the fit of such a model and its capability to parametrize appropriately the covariance structure of the observed multivariate process. The proposed method is based on a linear VARMA representation of the Markov Switching VAR model, from which we derive a close-form formula for its spectral density matrix. Then we evaluate the closeness of the sample spectral density matrix of the observed process to the spectral density matrix of the fitted model. Our results relate with the nice work of Paparoditis (2000, 2005) on the class of linear VARMA models. Some applications to real-life data are proposed in order to illustrate the behavior of spectral density functions, the goodness-of-fit tests and the feasibility of the approach.

Logos of narration in a philological novel

The article is devoted to studying connection of the narrative strategy with the features of a philological novel. The strategy realises “event” of communication between the subject and the addressee of the narration as well as it is a marker of the genre variety. As a result the strategy turns out to be associated with the categories of genre and discourse. On the basis of the works of different scientists, the problem of the correlation of the concepts is considered. The hypothesis is put forward that the logos of narration serves as a «mediator» between the strategy and genre features of a philological novel. On the basis of Charles Sanders Peirce’s doctrine about the typology of signs, the logos of narration in Vladimir Novikov’s novel «A Romance with Language» and David John Lodge’s novel «Nice Work» is explored. The analysis reveals the presence of iconic and metabolic logos in Vladimir Novikov’s novel while emblematic, in Lodge’s novel. The features of discursiveness in the novels testify to its connection with the genre features of a philological novel (playing with the reader, irony, provocativeness and the search for an ideal recipient). As an indicator of narrative modality (it is one of the elements of the strategy), the logos of narration becomes a «mediator» between the strategy and the characteristics of the genre in question.

Patient patience.

Today is my third day in the ED. I feel more comfortable here, and I know my way around. You want a flush, the ultrasound machine, even some fresh linens? I'm your guy. I feel more confident in other ways, too. I watched several ultrasound-guided IV placements during the past couple days and I'm running over the steps in my head-I can definitely do this. A stellar physician's assistant walks me through the steps one more time, encourages me, brings me to the bedside of a patient who needs a peripheral line placed, and he patiently supervises my work. I introduce myself as a third-year medical student and explain what I'm going to do in detail, for the patient's sake and for my own.

The enhancement of the employer branding strategies of Polish hospitals through the detection of features which determine employer attractiveness: a multidimensional perspective

BackgroundPolish healthcare providers already struggle with a deficiency concerning human resources, especially with regard to doctors and nurses. Because of this, effective HRM interventions should be taken in order to attract and retain medical personnel. Employer branding is one such intervention because it not only results in improving the organization's reputation as an employer but also improving HRM practices. However, to create an effective employer branding strategy, a contextual approach should be taken. Because of this, the aim of the study is to assess the importance of various factors influencing medical personnel’s perception of a hospital’s attractiveness as an employer.MethodsThe study was performed among 285 hospitals in Poland assuming a confidence level of 0.95. In each hospital, five respondents took part in the survey. The first cohort of respondents named ‘Directors’ consisted of hospital directors or employees authorized by them, mostly HR specialists. The other four groups were: ‘Hybrid Doctors Managers’ (individuals who had the roles of both doctor and manager); ‘Hybrid Nurses Managers’ (having the roles of both manager and nurse); ‘Physicians’; ‘Nurses’. Due to the ordinal nature of the data, the chi-square test of independence was used and the V-Cramer coefficient was determined. To indicate significant discrepancies between the responses of the respondents’ cohorts, the Kruskal–Wallis rank test was conducted.Results and discussionVarious groups of respondents perceive hospital attractiveness as an employer differently. While the opinions of medical personnel are more or less homogeneous, the cohort of employees responsible for HRM are less consistent with regard to their perception of hospital attractiveness. Additionally, ‘Directors’ highlight tangible factors determining hospital desirability. Moreover, their hierarchy of the top five factors influencing EB clearly exposes their quantitative orientation towards hospital performance management. Medical personnel hierarchies of the determinants expose qualitative orientation. Excluding country-dependent factors, such as regularity of remuneration payment, the professionals value such determinants as a nice work atmosphere, cooperation with colleagues (specialists), good working conditions and, most importantly, employment stability. The last determinant results from generational and gender tendencies (feminization), and yet it stands in contradiction with a tendency of flexible employment implemented in most developed countries due to a lack of medical personnel.ConclusionsThe results showed the importance of adapting employer branding strategies to the medical professional groups (doctors and nurses). This is because their perception of employers’ attractiveness differ. In addition, elements of the profession genotypes play an important role in how the physicians and nurses value various factors creating the employers’ attractiveness. The research also revealed the fact that top managers or HR specialists can wrongly identify the hospitals attractiveness since they are more quantitatively than qualitatively oriented. For this reason, they may implement inefficient EB strategies.

Relevance of transgenic mouse models for Alzheimer's disease.

Over the last several decades, a number of mouse models have been generated for mechanistic and preclinical therapeutic research on Alzheimer's disease (AD)-like behavioral impairments and pathology. Acceptance or rejection of these models by the scientific community is playing a prominent role in how research findings are viewed and whether grants get funded and manuscripts published. The question of whether models are useful has become an exceptionally contentious issue. Much time and effort have gone into investigators debating comments such as "there are no mouse models of AD," "…nice work but needs to be tested in another mouse model," or "only data from humans is valid." This leads to extensive written justifications for the choice of a model in grant applications, to the point of almost apologizing for the use of models. These debates also lead to initiatives to create new, better models of AD without consideration of what "better" may mean in this context. On the "other side," an argument supporting the use of mouse models is one cannot dissect a biological mechanism in postmortem human tissue. In this chapter, we examine issues that we believe must be addressed if in vivo AD research is to progress. We opine that it is not the models that are the issue, but rather a lack of understanding the aspects of AD-like pathology the models were designed to mimic. The goal here is to improve the utilization of models to address critical issues, not to offer a critique of existing models or make endorsements.

Philip A. Ebert and Marcus Rossberg, eds.*Essays on Frege’s Basic Laws of Arithmetic

Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithemtik vol. 1, 1893, vol. 2, 1903 (GG) has been reset and translated from German into English [Frege, 2013] with the formal function logic left beautifully intact. The project was initiated by Crispin Wright who led (2000–2005) an AHRC-funded project on the logical and metaphysical foundations of classical mathematics. Ebert and Rossberg conducted the translation project and are responsible for the wonderful result and the TEX package used to achieve it. The translation appeared in 2013 and offered an important occasion for a companion volume of new essays. Editors Ebert and Rossberg have produced a very nice work as a companion. It consists of 22 essays on all the centrally important aspects of Frege’s work: the Caesar problem, the context principle, recarving, the decomposition versus analysis of senses into parts, Frege on reals, creative definition, infinitesimals, series, and much more. The essays require different degrees of logical background which makes the collection very balanced. There are probing essays there for everyone interested in most every aspect of Frege’s philosophy. (The complete listing of all the contents of the volume can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1093/philmat/nkz025.)

NICE working with GW Pharma on cannabidiol issues

NICE working with GW Pharma on cannabidiol issues

The “nice work” of transforming the health workforce

The “nice work” of transforming the health workforce