Browsing by Subject "Failure"
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Item Open Access Consumers Anticipating and Managing Goal Failure: How Past Conflicts Shape Expectations and Language Influences Recovery(2024) Perez Abreu Velazquez, Luis EnriqueConsumers frequently encounter obstacles and failures in their pursuit of valued goals. For example, while pursuing the important goal of living a healthy lifestyle, central to their current and future well-being, consumers might encounter multiple obstacles, conflicts, and setbacks. These challenges are costly for industries whose product offerings support these goals and are detrimental to consumers’ well-being. This dissertation addresses two critical questions. First, given that obstacles, conflicts, and failure are so prevalent, what influences whether consumers expect them to occur? Second, once setbacks or failures have occurred, how do consumers respond?The first essay in this dissertation addresses the first question, investigating how past experiences of conflict with a goal inform expectations about future goal pursuit. Specifically, I examine how the perceived relationship among past conflicts with a focal goal—particularly, perceived variety—shapes expectations. Perceived variety refers to the holistic assessment of differentiation (vs. similarity) among items in an assortment. Six studies demonstrate that perceiving greater variety among past conflicts with a focal goal decreases expectations of encountering conflict in the future. This occurs because perceiving greater variety makes the causes of past events seem collectively unstable (i.e., more temporary and one-off). The second essay addresses the second question, investigating how the way consumers talk about setbacks and failure—specifically, as “not making” versus “not having” time— can shape their subsequent motivation and likelihood to re-engage with their goals. First, a multimethod examination, including the analysis of social media and mass media datasets, illustrates that consumers prefer to say they didn’t “have” (vs. “make”) time for a goal because doing so makes them feel better about what occurred. Second, the results of five experiments, including two field experiments, show how prompting consumers to say they didn’t “make” time instead, increases subsequent motivation to adhere to a goal. This occurs because doing so increases perceptions of personal control. Overall, this dissertation's findings contribute to our understanding of goal conflict, forecasting in goal pursuit, and how language influences recovery after goal failure.
Item Open Access FAILURE-SPARKED INNOVATION: THE KEY TO ENSURING THE FUTURE OF LOCAL CHURCHES(2021) Edwards, Kaury CharlesWithin the current cultural milieu of eclectic pluralism the Western Church currently finds itself in, innovation must be a central focus within all aspects of ministry in the Christian Church. With the focus that the local church must put on innovation, one aspect that will continually be an important factor is how the Church understands, interprets, and utilizes failure. The challenge for the local church is to rethink its notion of failure which will allow for creativity, new life, and ultimately, transformational innovation. By establishing a proper framework and definition of failure, the Church will be able to embrace good failure and the benefits it can offer. Calling the Church to embrace failure is also a call to embrace innovation and Design Thinking. Good failure is not fully beneficial without these two essential and creative tools. For every church struggling to muster the confidence to dive into creative exploration and experimentation or the minister who wrestles with sustaining a culture open to change and new ideas, applying the principles of innovation and Design Thinking aid immensely on one’s journey towards success. This path towards success will not be simple. At times, the path will be consumed with failure and disruption. Still, good failure must be embraced in order to foster adaptive learning, growth, and mastery. By adopting an innovative culture and leaning into good failure, the Church embraces culture that generates change, pursues excellence, ensures vitality, makes a difference in the world, and seeks to meet the needs of people. As the Church wrestles with failure as a means to produce and promote innovation, the local church responds to God’s call and partners with God in God’s creative and redemptive work throughout the world. Thus, as the Church seeks to continue its impactful work in the world, the Church must establish a sound methodology for innovation and untap the creative fountain of Design Thinking. Throughout the history of the Christian Church, there have been countless extraordinary saints who have innovated, revolutionized, and championed fresh expressions and aspects of the Church. However, while it is important to remember the Church’s noteworthy saints and their significant contributions, we should not forget that there were failures along the way, and these should not be ignored. For the majority of United Methodist ministers, John Wesley is one of the most esteemed and highlighted saints who dynamically revolutionized, innovated, and restructured the Church. Nevertheless, he too experienced failures throughout his life and ministry. Still, with each moment of failure, Wesley pressed on and pivoted to innovate in successful ways that changed the world forever, even birthing and shaping the people called Methodists. In today’s rapidly changing world, local churches need to follow the example of John Wesley – embrace good failure, practice innovation, and restore imagination to ensure their future. Regardless of how fast the world continues to spin, churches must recognize profound changes must be made to establish a sound framework for failure and innovation, foster an innovative culture, and evoke an operational model change that allows the Church to be better than it was yesterday. Ultimately, local churches must awaken its innovative spirit and join God in God’s ministry throughout the world.
Item Open Access FAILURE-SPARKED INNOVATION: THE KEY TO ENSURING THE FUTURE OF LOCAL CHURCHES(2021) Edwards, Kaury CharlesWithin the current cultural milieu of eclectic pluralism the Western Church currently finds itself in, innovation must be a central focus within all aspects of ministry in the Christian Church. With the focus that the local church must put on innovation, one aspect that will continually be an important factor is how the Church understands, interprets, and utilizes failure. The challenge for the local church is to rethink its notion of failure which will allow for creativity, new life, and ultimately, transformational innovation. By establishing a proper framework and definition of failure, the Church will be able to embrace good failure and the benefits it can offer. Calling the Church to embrace failure is also a call to embrace innovation and Design Thinking. Good failure is not fully beneficial without these two essential and creative tools. For every church struggling to muster the confidence to dive into creative exploration and experimentation or the minister who wrestles with sustaining a culture open to change and new ideas, applying the principles of innovation and Design Thinking aid immensely on one’s journey towards success. This path towards success will not be simple. At times, the path will be consumed with failure and disruption. Still, good failure must be embraced in order to foster adaptive learning, growth, and mastery. By adopting an innovative culture and leaning into good failure, the Church embraces culture that generates change, pursues excellence, ensures vitality, makes a difference in the world, and seeks to meet the needs of people. As the Church wrestles with failure as a means to produce and promote innovation, the local church responds to God’s call and partners with God in God’s creative and redemptive work throughout the world. Thus, as the Church seeks to continue its impactful work in the world, the Church must establish a sound methodology for innovation and untap the creative fountain of Design Thinking. Throughout the history of the Christian Church, there have been countless extraordinary saints who have innovated, revolutionized, and championed fresh expressions and aspects of the Church. However, while it is important to remember the Church’s noteworthy saints and their significant contributions, we should not forget that there were failures along the way, and these should not be ignored. For the majority of United Methodist ministers, John Wesley is one of the most esteemed and highlighted saints who dynamically revolutionized, innovated, and restructured the Church. Nevertheless, he too experienced failures throughout his life and ministry. Still, with each moment of failure, Wesley pressed on and pivoted to innovate in successful ways that changed the world forever, even birthing and shaping the people called Methodists. In today’s rapidly changing world, local churches need to follow the example of John Wesley – embrace good failure, practice innovation, and restore imagination to ensure their future. Regardless of how fast the world continues to spin, churches must recognize profound changes must be made to establish a sound framework for failure and innovation, foster an innovative culture, and evoke an operational model change that allows the Church to be better than it was yesterday. Ultimately, local churches must awaken its innovative spirit and join God in God’s ministry throughout the world.
Item Open Access Injury Detection and Localization in the Spine using Acoustic Emission(2016) Shridharani, Jay KetanThe National Spinal Cord Injury Statistical Center estimates there are 12,500 new cases of spinal cord injury (SCI) in the United States every year (www.nscisc.uab.edu, 2014) and vehicular crashes are the leading cause. Spinal injuries can have extensive long term consequences leading to widespread social and economic costs as well as the human cost of living with chronic, sometimes debilitating, pain (Côté et al. 1998, Côté et al. 2001, Daffner et al. 2003, Harrop et al. 2001, Sekhon et al. 2001). Within the military population, spinal injuries are a common result of repeated loading from high-speed planing watercraft (Bass et al. 2005, Gollwitzer et al. 1995, Schmidt et al. 2012), high performance aircraft (Coakwell et al. 2004, de Oliviera et al. 2005), and underbody blast exposure (Vasquez et al. 2011, Wilson 2006). Therefore, there is interest within the automotive, military, and clinical communities to understand the biomechanics the failure mechanics of the osteoligamentous structures in the spine.
Acoustic emissions have been shown to be produced during micro-cracking of cortical bone (Kohn 1995). However, there has been minimal work utilizing acoustic emission to detect cortical and trabecular bone damage. The research in this dissertation developed experimental and analytic methods of sensitively assessing when failure (both micro-cracks and more extensive failures) occurs in the cervical spine using acoustic emissions.
The acoustic emissions from cortical and trabecular bone failure were characterized using a Welch power spectrum density estimate and continuous wavelet transform. The power spectrum density results showed both cortical bone and trabecular bone failure produced wideband acoustic emission signals with spectral peaks between from 20 kHz to 1380 kHz and 24 kHz to 1382 kHz respectively. The continuous wavelet transform showed the spectral content begins with high frequency content followed quickly by low frequency content, but the low frequency lasts for a longer time causing it to dominate the response in the Welch power spectrum density. The first frequency component in the continuous wavelet transform was used to characterize the signals and was found to form three distinct bands in the cortical bone tests (166 ± 52.6 kHz, 379 ± 37.2 kHz, and 668 ± 63.4 kHz) and one band in the trabecular bone tests (185 ± 37.9 kHz). Therefore, observing spectral content within these bands suggests failure of the respective bone.
This dissertation also uses continuous wavelet transform to identify failure in whole cervical spine compression tests. Whole cervical spines placed in a pre-flexed and pre-extended posture were compressed to induce failure while being monitored for acoustic emissions. Cortical bone failure was identified in the acoustic emissions when local maxima in the continuous wavelet transform fell within the spectral bands associated with cortical bone failure previously identified. The timing of these failures was matched to the force-displacement response to identify the initiation of failure and the major failure. Cortical bone failure was detected at 70-90% of the failure load suggesting that the failure occurs as an evolution from micro-cracks to the eventual major failure. Locating these micro-cracks before the major failure forms may be useful in the prediction of the location of failure.
This dissertation also presents a technique to calculate the AE source location for AEs generated from fracture. The primary obstacle for AE source localization in the spine is that the speed of sound is different in cortical bone (Prevrhal et al. 2001), trabecular bone (Cardoso et al. 2003), intervertebral disc (Pluijm et al. 2004), ligaments (Kijima et al. 2009), and also differs based on its direction of travel in cortical bone (Kann et al. 1993) and likely in the other materials. Any algorithm must account for these differences to obtain any useful level of accuracy. The algorithm presented in this dissertation is based on hyperbolic source location algorithms (De Ronde et al. 2007, O'Toole et al. 2012, Salinas et al. 2010) except that it iterates on the speed of sound over a specified range, and convergence is defined as when the solution change is minimized. This procedure calculated the AE source location with a mean error of 5.7 mm and a standard deviation of 3.8 mm.
The contributions and conclusions of this dissertation provide methodology and results to evaluate the failure mechanics in the spine. Although these procedures were developed for use in the spine, they are of great value to the biomechanics community because they are applicable to every body region. The recommendations presented will serve to better understand the failure mechanics of the human body and will likely lead to better defined and safer standards for protective equipment. It also provides data for the generation of finite element models that require failure criteria.