Scientists and software engineers: A tale of two cultures

The two cultures of the title are those observed in my field studies: the culture of scientists (financial mathematicians, earth and planetary scientists, and molecular biologists) developing their own software, and the culture of software engineers developing scientific software. In this paper, I shall describe some problems arising when scientists and software engineers come together to develop scientific software and discuss how these problems may be ascribed to their two different cultures

RISK RESEARCH AND PUBLIC OUTREACH: A TALE OF TWO CULTURES?

Agricultural economists have been challenged in recent years, by voices inside and outside the profession, to evaluate the integrity of the operational bridge between research and extension activities in the land grant system. This essay investigates links between the work of risk researchers and outreach programs. Survey results indicate that (a) a significant number of risk researchers are involved in extension activities; (b) extension economists are less frequently involved in risk research than their colleagues with no extension appointment; (c) full-time extension economists use less sophisticated risk tools in their outreach efforts than used in their research; and (d) all respondents, regardless of appointment, see a need for more applied risk analysis. Major challenges include a lack of financial support to close the data gap and to conduct relevant applied analysis present major communication challenges.Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

A Tale of Two Cultures: Why Culture Trumps Core Values in Building Ethical Organizations

As research demonstrates that organizational culture is a primary influence of employee behavior and that leaders shape this behavior, this author explores the influence of the effects of organizational culture on ethical behavior by considering two separate, and very different, corporate case studies: Enron and Zappos

Language and Inflation

Macroeconomic controversy is largely a tale of three cities - Chicago and the two Cambridges - or more accurately a tale of the cultures and policy prescriptions associated with those cities. In the four decades between the General Theory and the monetarist counter-revolution, economists were \u27normally\u27 distributed around orthodoxy (the Keynesian Neoclassical Synthesis, the ISLM model etc.) with the Chicago version of the Quantity Theory two standard deviations from the mean in the right tail, and the \u27true believers\u27 in Cambridge England an equal distance from the mean in the left tail. The preferred method of orthodox research involved \u27formalist\u27 tools (a label that can be stretched to include econometrics and Walrasian equations). Penetrating the veil of macroeconomics reveals some successful language revolutions at work. ISBN: 033373045

Privacy Protection: A Tale of Two Cultures

The paper provides a novel and critical analysis of privacy as an instrumental notion within social and cultural contexts. The argument suggests there is much utility in a novel multiple-perspective approach to the study of privacy in a socio-legal context. It questions our assumptions about privacy by looking to a differing privacy culture - that of the India. It examines the Indian perception of privacy based on India's cultural values and offers an explanation for why India's concept of privacy is beyond the often dominated public-private dichotomy and why it has implicitly or explicitly affected the agenda for privacy theory by placing some issues in the limelight while leaving others backstage. The importance of the argument is due to its critical assessment of the current European approach (from the EC, ECJ and ECHR) where privacy is regarded as an inalienable right with a concrete psychological foundation. I argue that privacy interests are far more extensive and deeper than the European definition which can at best capture only some of the issues which require elucidation when we litigate over privacy

Managing complex fires in urban environments: a tale of two cultures

Prior research has examined how experienced fireground commanders make task related decisions under a range of unfavourable conditions, however gaps still exist in the literature when there is need to evaluate the coping strategies of incident commanders across different urban environments. There was rarely any study found to have explored cross-cultural differences that exist between two or more fire services with distinct cultural orientations. This paper reports findings from a study that compared firefighting approaches used by the UK and Nigerian firefighters. Thirty experienced officers were interviewed (UK=15, Nigeria =15) using the critical decision method, and retrospective incident reports were collected and analysed. As expected, results revealed that the UK fire service are significantly better equipped with advanced equipment compared to their Nigerian counterparts who often make improvisations using relatively unsafe methods. However, evidence was found to suggest that the Nigerian officers are culturally biased towards the use of certain firefighting equipment. The implications of these cultural differences for practice are discussed