University of Alabama

About: University of Alabama is a education organization based out in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 27323 authors who have published 48609 publications receiving 1565337 citations. The organization is also known as: Alabama & Bama.

Customer-based corporate reputation of a service firm: scale development and validation

Abstract: Although corporate reputation has attracted significant attention among marketing scholars, current measures of it do not adequately capture the perceptions of the most important stakeholder group, customers, and often overlook its relationship to important customer-outcome variables. In this article, we identify dimensions of customer-based corporate reputation and develop scales to measure these dimensions (Study 1). Based on comprehensive validation procedures across three service firm types, we found support for a five-dimensional scale with the following dimensions: Customer Orientation, Good Employer, Reliable and Financially Strong Company, Product and Service Quality, and Social and Environmental Responsibility. In Study 2, using a second sample, we validate our scale and examine its relationship with important customer-outcome variables—customer satisfaction, loyalty, trust, and word of mouth. Most of the reputation dimensions were strongly associated with important outcome variables, with a few exceptions. We discuss the results with reference to the marketing implications.

Biomass resilience of Neotropical secondary forests

Abstract: Land-use change occurs nowhere more rapidly than in the tropics, where the imbalance between deforestation and forest regrowth has large consequences for the global carbon cycle. However, considerable uncertainty remains about the rate of biomass recovery in secondary forests, and how these rates are influenced by climate, landscape, and prior land use. Here we analyse aboveground biomass recovery during secondary succession in 45 forest sites and about 1,500 forest plots covering the major environmental gradients in the Neotropics. The studied secondary forests are highly productive and resilient. Aboveground biomass recovery after 20 years was on average 122 megagrams per hectare (Mg ha(-1)), corresponding to a net carbon uptake of 3.05 Mg C ha(-1) yr(-1), 11 times the uptake rate of old-growth forests. Aboveground biomass stocks took a median time of 66 years to recover to 90% of old-growth values. Aboveground biomass recovery after 20 years varied 11.3-fold (from 20 to 225 Mg ha(-1)) across sites, and this recovery increased with water availability (higher local rainfall and lower climatic water deficit). We present a biomass recovery map of Latin America, which illustrates geographical and climatic variation in carbon sequestration potential during forest regrowth. The map will support policies to minimize forest loss in areas where biomass resilience is naturally low (such as seasonally dry forest regions) and promote forest regeneration and restoration in humid tropical lowland areas with high biomass resilience.

Particle-flow reconstruction and global event description with the CMS detector

Abstract: The CMS apparatus was identified, a few years before the start of the LHC operation at CERN, to feature properties well suited to particle-flow (PF) reconstruction: a highly-segmented tracker, a fine-grained electromagnetic calorimeter, a hermetic hadron calorimeter, a strong magnetic field, and an excellent muon spectrometer. A fully-fledged PF reconstruction algorithm tuned to the CMS detector was therefore developed and has been consistently used in physics analyses for the first time at a hadron collider. For each collision, the comprehensive list of final-state particles identified and reconstructed by the algorithm provides a global event description that leads to unprecedented CMS performance for jet and hadronic τ decay reconstruction, missing transverse momentum determination, and electron and muon identification. This approach also allows particles from pileup interactions to be identified and enables efficient pileup mitigation methods. The data collected by CMS at a centre-of-mass energy of 8\TeV show excellent agreement with the simulation and confirm the superior PF performance at least up to an average of 20 pileup interactions.

Comorbidity of chronic insomnia with medical problems.

Abstract: Study Objectives: Determine the comorbidity of insomnia with medical problems. Design: Cross-sectional and retrospective. Participants: Community-based population of 772 men and women, aged 20 to 98 years old. Measurements: Self-report measures of sleep, health, depression, and anxiety. Results: People with chronic insomnia reported more of the following than did people without insomnia: heart disease (21.9% vs 9.5%), high blood pressure (43.1% vs 18.7%), neurologic disease (7.3% vs 1.2%), breathing problems (24.8% vs 5.7%), urinary problems (19.7% vs 9.5%), chronic pain (50.4% vs 18.2%), and gastrointestinal problems (33.6% vs 9.2%). Conversely, people with the following medical problems reported more chronic insomnia than did those without those medical problems: heart disease (44.1% vs 22.8%), cancer (41.4% vs 24.6%), high blood pressure (44.0% vs 19.3%), neurologic disease (66.7% vs 24.3%), breathing problems (59.6% vs 21.4%), urinary problems (41.5% vs 23.3%), chronic pain (48.6% vs 17.2%), and gastrointestinal problems (55.4% vs 20.0%). When all medical problems were considered together, only patients with high blood pressure, breathing problems, urinary problems, chronic pain, and gastrointestinal problems continued to have statistically higher levels of insomnia than those without these medical disorders. Conclusion: This study demonstrates significant overlap between insomnia and multiple medical problems. Some research has shown it is possible to treat insomnia that is comorbid with select psychiatric (depression) and medical (eg, pain and cancer) disorders, which in turn increases the quality of life and functioning of these patients. The efficacy of treating insomnia in many of the above comorbid disorders has not been tested, indicating a need for future treatment research.

Callous-unemotional traits and conduct problems in the prediction of conduct problem severity, aggression, and self-report of delinquency.

Abstract: The role of callous-unemotional (CU) traits and conduct problems in predicting conduct problem severity, severity and type of aggression, and self-reported delinquency at a 1-year follow-up was investigated in a sample of 98 children (mean age 12.43; SD = 1.72) recruited from a community-wide screening. Children with both CU traits and conduct problems had a greater number and variety of conduct problems at follow-up than children who at the screening had high levels of conduct problems alone. However, this poorer outcome for children with CU traits could largely be accounted for by differences in initial level of conduct problem severity. Children with CU traits and conduct problems were also at risk for showing higher levels of aggression, especially proactive aggression, and self-reported delinquency. Importantly, these outcomes could not be solely explained by initial level of conduct problem severity. Finally, CU traits predicted self-reported delinquency in some children who did not initially show high levels of conduct problems and this predictive relationship seemed to be strongest for girls in the sample who were high on CU traits but who did not show significant conduct problems.