DePaul University

About: DePaul University is a education organization based out in Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 5658 authors who have published 11562 publications receiving 295257 citations.

Ethics, CSR, and Sustainability Education in the Financial Times Top 50 Global Business Schools: Baseline Data and Future Research Directions

Abstract: This paper investigates how deans and directors at the top 50 global MBA programs (as rated by the Financial Times in their 2006 Global MBA rankings) respond to questions about the inclusion and coverage of the topics of ethics, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability at their respective institutions. This work purposely investigates each of the three topics separately. Our findings reveal that: (1) a majority of the schools require that one or more of these topics be covered in their MBA curriculum and one-third of the schools require coverage of all three topics as part of the MBA curriculum, (2) there is a trend toward the inclusion of sustainability-related courses, (3) there is a higher percentage of student interest in these topics (as measured by the presence of a Net Impact club) in the top 10 schools, and (4) several schools are teaching these topics using experiential learning and immersion techniques. We note a fivefold increase in the number of stand-alone ethics courses since a 1988 investigation on ethics, and we include other findings about institutional support of centers or special programs; as well as a discussion of integration, teaching techniques, and notable practices in relation to all three topics.

Sociopolitical Development as an Antidote for Oppression—Theory and Action

Abstract: Although psychology has an ample vocabulary for describing individual pathologies, the development of theory and concepts for understanding societal pathology remains in its infancy. Because community psychology theory views human behavior in its context, it is essential that interventions not be limited to stress management, personal coping, and similar programming. Interventions should not leave social injustice undiscussed and unchallenged. In this spirit we present a theory of oppression and sociopolitical development that informs an intervention with young, African American men in an urban setting. The five-stage theory highlights the role of Freire's notion of “critical consciousness,” a sociopolitical version of critical thinking, in enhancing an awareness of sociopolitical as well as personal forces that influence behavior. The theory also draws on African American social-change traditions and their spiritual aspects. The action section of the study describes the Young Warriors program's use of mass culture (rap videos and film) as stimuli for the development of critical consciousness. Highlights from an empirical investigation of an eight-session high school version of the program will be presented to illustrate the practical challenges and benefits of sociopolitical interventions.

Changing attitudes about change: longitudinal effects of transformational leader behavior on employee cynicism about organizational change

Abstract: Using longitudinal data collected in two waves, nine months apart, from 372 employees, this research is an empirical assessment of individual-level change within an organizational setting. Specifically, strategies used by change implementers were operationalized as six transformational leader behaviors, and then hypothesized to influence employees' cynicism about organizational change (CAOC). A combination of social learning theory, and communication research served as the theoretical rationale to explain transformational leadership's hypothesized effects. As posited, transformational leader behaviors (TLB) generally were associated with lower employee CAOC. Further, the direction of causality was consistent in suggesting that the TLB reduced employee CAOC. A discussion concerning the ethical use of TLBs and recommendations for future research are provided. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Discovery and Evaluation of Aggregate Usage Profiles for Web Personalization

Abstract: Web usage mining, possibly used in conjunction with standard approaches to personalization such as collaborative filtering, can help address some of the shortcomings of these techniques, including reliance on subjective user ratings, lack of scalability, and poor performance in the face of high-dimensional and sparse data However, the discovery of patterns from usage data by itself is not sufficient for performing the personalization tasks The critical step is the effective derivation of good quality and useful (ie, actionable) “aggregate usage profiles” from these patterns In this paper we present and experimentally evaluate two techniques, based on clustering of user transactions and clustering of pageviews, in order to discover overlapping aggregate profiles that can be effectively used by recommender systems for real-time Web personalization We evaluate these techniques both in terms of the quality of the individual profiles generated, as well as in the context of providing recommendations as an integrated part of a personalization engine In particular, our results indicate that using the generated aggregate profiles, we can achieve effective personalization at early stages of users' visits to a site, based only on anonymous clickstream data and without the benefit of explicit input by these users or deeper knowledge about them

Building efficient and effective metasearch engines

Abstract: Frequently a user's information needs are stored in the databases of multiple search engines. It is inconvenient and inefficient for an ordinary user to invoke multiple search engines and identify useful documents from the returned results. To support unified access to multiple search engines, a metasearch engine can be constructed. When a metasearch engine receives a query from a user, it invokes the underlying search engines to retrieve useful information for the user. Metasearch engines have other benefits as a search tool such as increasing the search coverage of the Web and improving the scalability of the search. In this article, we survey techniques that have been proposed to tackle several underlying challenges for building a good metasearch engine. Among the main challenges, the database selection problem is to identify search engines that are likely to return useful documents to a given query. The document selection problem is to determine what documents to retrieve from each identified search engine. The result merging problem is to combine the documents returned from multiple search engines. We will also point out some problems that need to be further researched.