This dissertation summarizes research that focused on the new hire process for a targeted population within the Computer/Telephony Industry. The primary objective of this research was to determine how to build and maintain an effective employee/employer partnership that helped ensure employee loyalty. The research design was taken from the theoretical framework of Vroom's Work Motivation model adapted using Dunnette's work with relevant job features along with Scott's theories on Jablin's model of organization-wide communications. The study examined survey responses for importance and expectation/realization ratings of 15 job features given by 150 newly hired individuals at their new hire orientation and then at the individual's eight month anniversary. In addition, focus group sessions were conducted and statistical analyses were performed. The study found that overall employees had stronger feelings about certain job feature importance than job feature expectation certainty. The results showed that employees who remained with the company exhibited a change in importance and initial expectation set. This flexibility was demonstrated in the trade-offs that employees made between attributes of intrinsic value. The Chi-Square results on intent to leave showed that the level of overall satisfaction is significantly related to intentions of leaving. Review of the exit interview data reveals that the job feature of being a "Good Boss" was the deciding factor in the individual's decision to leave the business. Overall, respondents who voluntarily resigned or who remained with the organization based their final decision on how effective the supervisor/subordinate communications and organizational citizenship capabilities of the boss were perceived. The findings support Jablin and Scott's research investigating organizational communication relationships while expanding Dunnette's definitions of critical job features. In conclusion, the findings also validated that Vroom's expectancy theory can be used when predicting behaviors in situations where choices are made such as whether to expect an employee to remain or leave an organization.

Today's tech-savvy and digitally connected students present a new challenge for today's school librarians. This book offers the 21st-century tools and know-how necessary for educators to appeal to and challenge students to learn—and to want to learn. What are the best ways to motivate students to become engaged and develop a passion for learning? Can appealing to their desire for socialization and constant communication—attributes of their lives outside of education—via the integration of cutting-edge technologies and "new media" in the library or classroom serve to ignite creativity, curiosity, and critical thinking? This book shows how you can make use of non-traditional tools such as popular social networks, collaborative technologies, and cloud computing to teach information and communications technologies integrated with the school curriculum to improve student learning—and demonstrates how these same technologies can help you measure skills and mastery learning. The book provides an easy-to-follow blueprint for using collaborative techniques, innovation, and teaching for creativity to achieve the new learning paradigm of self-directed learning, such as flipping the classroom or library. Readers of this book will find concrete, step-by-step examples of proven lesson plans, collaborative models, and time-saving strategies for the successful integration of American Association of School Librarians (AASL) standards. The authors—both award-winning teachers—explain the quantitatively and qualitatively measurable educational value of using these technologies for core curricular and information and communications technologies instruction, showing that they both enhance student learning outcomes and provide data for measuring their impact on learning.

We report progress on the R&D program for electron-cooling of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). This electron cooler is designed to cool 100 GeV/nucleon at storage energy using 54 MeV electrons. The electron source will be a superconducting RF photocathode gun. The accelerator will be a superconducting energy recovery linac. The frequency of the accelerator is set at 703.75 MHz. The maximum electron bunch frequency is 9.38 MHz, with bunch charge of 20 nC. The R&D program has the following components: The photoinjector and its photocathode, the superconducting linac cavity, start-to-end beam dynamics with magnetized electrons, electron cooling calculations including benchmarking experiments and development of a large superconducting solenoid. The photoinjector and linac cavity are being incorporated into an energy recovery linac aimed at demonstrating ampere class current at about 20 MeV. A Zeroth Order Design Report is in an advanced draft state, and can be found on the web at http://www.agsrhichome.bnl.gov/eCool.

Next generation ERL light-sources, high-energy electron coolers, high-power Free-Electron Lasers, powerful Compton X-ray sources and many other accelerators were made possible by the emerging technology of high-power, high-brightness electron beams. In order to get the anticipated performance level of ampere-class currents, many technological barriers are yet to be broken. BNL's Collider-Accelerator Department is pursuing some of these technologies for its electron cooling of RHIC application, as well as a possible future electron-hadron collider. We will describe work on CW, high-current and high-brightness electron beams. This will include a description of a superconducting, laser-photocathode RF gun and an accelerator cavity capable of producing low emittance (about 1 micron rms normalized) one nano-Coulomb bunches at currents of the order of one ampere average.

Entrepreneurial growth companies are only a small portion of the companies in the United States, but they play a large role in creating jobs and fueling the economy. Nonetheless, confusion about these fast-growing companies produces diffuse or misdirected efforts to support this key sector, which creates problems for policymakers attempting to promote entrepreneurship. For these reasons, the report describes the key features of successful entrepreneurial growth companies. The report is based on results of nationwide focus groups conducted by the National Commission on Entrepreneurship, and research by Amar Bhide. The first section describes the key features of entrepreneurial growth companies, including origins, productivity gains, and growth. The second section dispels common myths about what makes entrepreneurial growth companies successful. Identified are the "risk-taking myth," the "high-tech invention myth," the "expert myth," the "strategic vision myth," and the "venture capital myth." The third section explores broad policy considerations important to supporting continued entrepreneurship growth in the United States. These include sharing risks and rewards, fostering and protecting innovation, fostering expertise, improving planning and strategy, and creating a vibrant capital market.