Kutztown University of Pennsylvania

About: Kutztown University of Pennsylvania is a education organization based out in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Poison control & Juvenile delinquency. The organization has 587 authors who have published 1263 publications receiving 18966 citations. The organization is also known as: Kutztown State Teacher's College & Kutztown University.

Applicant reactions to selection procedures

Abstract: We note that applicant reactions to selection procedures may be of practical importance to employers because of influences on organizations’attractiveness to candidates, ethical and legal issues, and possible effects on selection procedure validity and utility. In Study 1, after reviewing sample items or brief descriptions of 14 selection tools, newly hired entry-level managers (n= 110) and recruiting/employment managers (n= 44) judged simulations, interviews, and cognitive tests with relatively concrete item-types (e.g., vocabulary, standard written English, mathematical word problems) to be significantly more job related than personality, biodata, and cognitive tests with relatively abstract item-types (e.g., quantitative comparisons, letter sets). A measure of new managers’cognitive abilities was positively correlated with their perceptions of the job relatedness of selection procedures. In Study 2, applicant reactions to a range of entry-level to professional civil service examinations (assessed immediately after tasting the exam) were positively related to (procedural and distributive) justice perceptions and willingness to recommend the employer to others (assessed one month after the exam, n= 460).

Maternal and Paternal Parenting Styles in Adolescents: Associations with Self-Esteem, Depression and Life-Satisfaction

Abstract: Our study examined variations in adolescent adjustment as a function of maternal and paternal parenting styles. Participants included 272 students in grades 9 and 11 from a public high school in a metropolitan area of the Northeastern US. Participants completed measures of maternal and paternal parenting styles and indices of psychological adjustment. Authoritative mothering was found to relate to higher self-esteem and life-satisfaction and to lower depression. Paternal parenting styles was also related to psychological adjustment, however, although the advantage of authoritative mothering over permissive mothering was evident for all outcomes assessed, for paternal styles the advantage was less defined and only evident for depression. Our study highlights the importance of examining process-oriented agents as part of the broader interest in well-being variations in adolescents.

Bacillus thuringiensis: a genomics and proteomics perspective.

Abstract: Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a unique bacterium in that it shares a common place with a number of chemical compounds which are used commercially to control insects important to agriculture and public health. Although other bacteria, including B. popilliae and B. sphaericus, are used as microbial insecticides, their spectrum of insecticidal activity is quite limited compared to Bt. Importantly, Bt is safe for humans and is the most widely used environmentally compatible biopesticide worldwide. Furthermore, insecticidal Bt genes have been incorporated into several major crops, rendering them insect resistant, and thus providing a model for genetic engineering in agriculture.This review highlights what the authors consider the most relevant issues and topics pertaining to the genomics and proteomics of Bt. At least one of the authors (L.A.B.) has spent most of his professional life studying different aspects of this bacterium with the goal in mind of determining the mechanism(s) by which it kills insects. The other authors have a much shorter experience with Bt but their intellect and personal insight have greatly enriched our understanding of what makes Bt distinctive in the microbial world. Obviously, there is personal interest and bias reflected in this article notwithstanding oversight of a number of published studies. This review contains some material not published elsewhere although several ideas and concepts were developed from a broad base of scientific literature up to 2010.

Berkeley Supernova Ia Program – I. Observations, data reduction and spectroscopic sample of 582 low-redshift Type Ia supernovae

Abstract: In this first paper in a series, we present 1298 low-redshift (z ≲ 0.2) optical spectra of 582 Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) observed from 1989 to 2008 as part of the Berkeley Supernova Ia Program (BSNIP). 584 spectra of 199 SNe Ia have well-calibrated light curves with measured distance moduli, and many of the spectra have been corrected for host-galaxy contamination. Most of the data were obtained using the Kast double spectrograph mounted on the Shane 3 m telescope at Lick Observatory and have a typical wavelength range of 3300–10 400 A, roughly twice as wide as spectra from most previously published data sets. We present our observing and reduction procedures, and we describe the resulting SN Database, which will be an online, public, searchable data base containing all of our fully reduced spectra and companion photometry. In addition, we discuss our spectral classification scheme (using the SuperNova IDentification code, snid; Blondin & Tonry), utilizing our newly constructed set of snid spectral templates. These templates allow us to accurately classify our entire data set, and by doing so we are able to reclassify a handful of objects as bona fide SNe Ia and a few other objects as members of some of the peculiar SN Ia subtypes. In fact, our data set includes spectra of nearly 90 spectroscopically peculiar SNe Ia. We also present spectroscopic host-galaxy redshifts of some SNe Ia where these values were previously unknown. The sheer size of the BSNIP data set and the consistency of our observation and reduction methods make this sample unique among all other published SN Ia data sets and complementary in many ways to the large, low-redshift SN Ia spectra presented by Matheson et al. and Blondin et al. In other BSNIP papers in this series, we use these data to examine the relationships between spectroscopic characteristics and various observables such as photometric and host-galaxy properties.

Quality Improvement Incentives and Product Recall Cost Sharing Contracts

Abstract: As companies outsource more product design and manufacturing activities to other members of the supply chain, improving end-product quality has become an endeavor extending beyond the boundaries of the firms' in-house process capabilities. In this paper, we discuss two contractual agreements by which product recall costs can be shared between a manufacturer and a supplier to induce quality improvement effort. More specifically, we consider (i) cost sharing based on selective root cause analysis (Contract S), and (ii) partial cost sharing based on complete root cause analysis (Contract P). Using insights from supermodular game theory, for each contractual agreement, we characterize the levels of effort the manufacturer and the supplier would exert in equilibrium to improve their component failure rate when their effort choices are subject to moral hazard. We show that both Contract S and Contract P can achieve the first best effort levels; however, Contract S results in higher profits for the manufacturer and the supply chain. For the case in which the information about the quality of the supplier's product is not revealed to the manufacturer (i.e., the case of information asymmetry), we develop a menu of contracts that can be used to mitigate the impact of information asymmetry. We show that the menu of contracts not only significantly decreases the manufacturer's cost due to information asymmetry, but also improves product quality.