Georgian Court University

ABSTRACT This study investigates the impact of production systems, including: (1) open production system (OP) and (2) vertical farm (VF) on lettuce quality. The study aligns with SDG 2 (Zero Hunger) and SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production). Germination experiments were carried out inside a climate‐controlled farm for 4 weeks with two varieties of lettuces: Ruby Sky Lettuce (LR) and Patrona Lettuce (LO). Then, seedlings were planted in two experimental settings: an open production system (OP) with a dripping irrigation system and a vertical farm treatment (VF) with an aero hydroponic irrigation system arrangement with a 200 L nutrient tank. A comparison test was carried out between Patrona Lettuce (LO) and Ruby Sky Lettuce (LR), which were harvested in two different production systems. The two lettuce varieties, Ruby Lettuce (RL) and Patrona Lettuce (PL), were sampled for microbiological analysis and counts using the following quality indicators: aerobic mesophilic microorganisms, coliforms, fungi, and yeast to compare the production systems. Microbial analysis revealed significantly lower counts of aerobic mesophilic microorganisms, coliforms, and fungi in vertical lettuce. For Ruby Sky, outdoor production resulted in 29‐, 32‐, and 37‐times higher counts, respectively. Patrona exhibited similar trends. These findings suggest that vertical farming enhances food safety by minimizing microbial contamination. VF can empower small‐scale farmers, improve agricultural productivity, and enhance food security, particularly in regions facing limited land and water resources, thus reaching towards SDG 2 and SDG 12.

Higher education faculty members are increasingly being asked to defend their teaching methods with research-based support. This article offers such evidence through a randomized control-group pretest-posttest study that examined whether a newly created andragogy method, Forming Optimal Classroom Environments (FOCE), increased master’s students’ research self-efficacy in comparison to the standard teaching method (STM). The article details the model, based on Bandura’s social cognitive theory, particularly his concept of self-efficacy. The model relies upon both Bandura’s publications and results over the last forty years from researchers who have investigated higher education teaching techniques based on the concept of self-efficacy. Fifteen such research-based techniques form the model. Results found no significant interaction effect when comparing FOCE with the STM. Additionally, both teaching methods demonstrated that knowledge increases were positively correlated with research self-efficacy increases. This indicates that increasing research knowledge is one factor in increasing students’ research self-efficacy. Implications of findings are discussed.

This study focuses on employee bribery by third parties and summarises the state of third-party anti-bribery processes and the company's confidence to assess third-party bribery and corruption risks. A qualitative research approach was utilised to interview internal auditors and managers and asks open-ended questions to understand the internal controls in place to prevent or detect the bribery of employees, the internal audit process, and the types of frauds witnessed. The findings show all respondents acknowledge the risk of employee fraud and bribery by third parties and utilise internal audits along with preventive and mitigating controls to manage risks. Based on the findings, we identified themes that mirror the assessment of risk that third parties could bribe employees and the development of controls to limit the employee with or without regard to third parties.

Because of the “problem of individual causal inefficacy,” it has been difficult to explain why a purchase that will make little to no difference to a producer’s wrongdoing is itself morally wrong. Some have recently appealed to the concept of complicity in order to support the idea that consumers have a moral reason to avoid purchasing from companies engaged in wrongdoing. In this paper, I contribute to the development of this direction in consumer ethics. First, I explore how we should define moral complicity in such situations. Some have claimed that an individual’s purchase makes her complicit, even though it makes no difference to the wrongdoing, because she is still knowingly joining in with the wrong that the company or other consumers are doing. I argue, however, that it is difficult to see making a purchase as a form of joining in a joint or group action. Instead, I respond to the causal inefficacy problem directly. I argue that even when the outcome is massively overdetermined, an individual purchase still makes a causal contribution to the principal wrongdoing and thus a basic condition for an act of moral complicity is met. Yet, this does not resolve the deeper question of whether and why consumers should morally avoid purchases that make them complicit in these cases. The issue is with how small the causal contribution such an individual purchase makes. That is, an individual purchase in such a situation may only make one a little bit complicit. I argue that for the concept of moral complicity to gain traction here, we will have to appeal to normative concerns besides the outcome of the complicit action. Still, even with this account, purchases in such overdetermination cases may not often be all things considered wrong because the reasons against them may be outweighed by other relevant reasons.

Chapter 1 provides historical context for the advent of cross-sex collaboration as a widespread modernist practice by examining the efforts of several writers and intellectuals between 1885 and 1908 to theorize the gendered nature of creativity or imagine mutually satisfying, socially transformative ways in which men and women might work together outside of traditional marriage. Three recurring subjects of concern emerge that shape the discourse regarding relations between the sexes at the time: marriage, androgyny, and genius. All three of these ideas, I argue, promise to fulfill the age-old fantasy of allowing individuals to recapture a lost state of primordial wholeness by uniting two opposite natures as one. The historical analysis in this chapter also provides a frame for examining two co-signed, late-nineteenth-century works that exemplify how some writers began to view cross-sex collaboration as ideally suited for exploring one or more of the subjects of marriage, androgyny, and genius: Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling’s 1886 pamphlet The Woman Question, and Thomas Hardy and Florence Henniker’s 1894 short story “The Spectre of the Real.”

Major figures including W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf viewed 'cross-sex' collaboration as a valuable, and often subversive, strategy for bringing women and men's differing perspectives into productive dialogue while harnessing the creative potential of gendered discord. This study is the first to acknowledge collaboration between women and men as an important part of the modernist effort to 'make it new.' Drawing on current methods from textual scholarship to read modernist texts as material, socially constructed products of multiple hands, the study argues that cross-sex collaboration involved writers working not just with each other, but also with publishers and illustrators. By documenting and tracing the contours of their desire for cross-sex collaboration, we gain a new understanding of the modernists' thinking about sex and gender relations, as well as three related topics of great interest to them: marriage, androgyny, and genius.