The Character X Factor in Selecting Leaders: Beyond Ethics, Virtues, and Values

Leading with character requires a person to maintain a delicate balance of certain traits and understand the tensions which exist between humility and conviction, reluctance and courage, and vulnerability and integrity. A true leader must look beyond the content of a problem and rather examine the context of his or her individual make-up in relationship to themselves as well as to their surroundings

Self-employed or not Self-employed? Working Conditions of ‘Economically Dependent Workers’

In recent years, practices such as outsourcing and contracting-out have increasingly blurred the boundaries between dependent employment and self-employment. A new group of workers has emerged, which comprises workers who are formally ‘self-employed’, but present some characteristics of employees. These ‘economically dependent workers’ usually have a commercial contract (or ‘service contract’) rather than an employment contract; they are therefore registered as self-employed when in reality their working conditions have a lot in common with those of employees. This development makes it difficult to distinguish (within those who are registered as self-employed) between people who are really self-employed and running their own business, and people who for example depend on a single employer for their income and thus have no real autonomy in running their ‘business’. The purpose of this short exploratory paper is to investigate the position of these economically dependent workers and to find out whether overall their working conditions are more similar to those of the self-employed or to those of employees. This exercise builds on data from the 2010 wave of the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS)

Adaptive Probability Theory: Human Biases as an Adaptation

Humans make mistakes in our decision-making and probability judgments. While the heuristics used for decision-making have been explained as adaptations that are both efficient and fast, the reasons why people deal with probabilities using the reported biases have not been clear. We will see that some of these biases can be understood as heuristics developed to explain a complex world when little information is available. That is, they approximate Bayesian inferences for situations more complex than the ones in laboratory experiments and in this sense might have appeared as an adaptation to those situations. When ideas as uncertainty and limited sample sizes are included in the problem, the correct probabilities are changed to values close to the observed behavior. These ideas will be used to explain the observed weight functions, the violations of coalescing and stochastic dominance reported in the literature

A Pedagogical Value From Mathematical Mistakes

A real correct and mistake basically have the same point. Mistake done by student during doing mathematics problem can have the positive values and worth to develop the new mathematics concept. In mathematics teaching, process to understand a concept sometimes will be easier if besides gave a lead real correct and also accompanied by the counter of example from looking the aspect of mathematics mistake good for student and to learn in developing values pedagogic such thinking critical, logical, analytical in exploring to born the new mathematics. We often dismiss a mistake as something to be avoided and at best to be corrected as soon as possible. Many types of algebraic mistakes and purely arithmetic ones and discusses how they can be channeled into positive, useful learning, and growing experience. Mathematical Mistake can be used as a springboard for developing new mathematics and can be use to turn negative experiences into positive ones. Key Words: Mathematical Mistake, Pedagogical Value

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF USING PROCEDURE GENRE TO IMPROVE WRITING SKILL FOR VII GRADE STUDENTS IN SMP N 1 GROGOL, SUKOHARJO

Retna Fatmawati, 2010. The Effectiveness of Using Procedure Genre to Improve Writing Skill for VII Grade Students in SMP N 1 Grogol Sukoharjo. English Diploma Program, Faculty if Letters and Fine Arts, Sebelas Maret University. This final project was written based on the writer’s job training as an English teacher in SMP N 1 Grogol Sukoharjo which was done for a month. The writer took two classes in VII D and VII E as the subject to be observed. This final project discusses the effectiveness of using procedure genre to improve writing skill for VII grade students in junior high school. During the job training, the writer took some activities to collect the data by doing observation in the school and the class, interviewing the English teacher to get more information about the school and the English teaching and learning process. The genre used by the writer to teach writing skill the students was procedure genre. While the type of writing performance used by the writer was guided writing. For teaching writing of procedure genre, the writer asked to the students to make an imperative sentence. It was not too difficult for them because they have been got this material before. Then, the writer gave them a procedure text. After that, the writer explained the generic structure of procedure text. The next activity is the writer was random that procedure text. The writer asked to the students arranged it into a good procedure. To make them attracted, class divided into four groups, each group has a leader. The leader was writing a good procedure in the white board while the rest of the members give instruction to the leader to do the task. After that, the writer asked to the students to make a procedure text individually. Most of the students got the difficulties such as vocabulary use and punctuation use. Grammatically, they did not get any difficulties because they have been gotten imperative sentence before. Overall they can make a simple procedure text. Therefore, the writing skill of the student especially in writing procedure improved. It was proven by looking at the students’ writing in the end of the meeting

The attentional drift-diffusion model extends to simple purchasing decisions

How do we make simple purchasing decisions (e.g., whether or not to buy a product at a given price)? Previous work has shown that the attentional drift-diffusion model (aDDM) can provide accurate quantitative descriptions of the psychometric data for binary and trinary value-based choices, and of how the choice process is guided by visual attention. Here we extend the aDDM to the case of purchasing decisions, and test it using an eye-tracking experiment. We find that the model also provides a reasonably accurate quantitative description of the relationship between choice, reaction time, and visual fixations using parameters that are very similar to those that best fit the previous data. The only critical difference is that the choice biases induced by the fixations are about half as big in purchasing decisions as in binary choices. This suggests that a similar computational process is used to make binary choices, trinary choices, and simple purchasing decisions

Investigating novice programming mistakes: educator beliefs vs. student data

Educators often form opinions on which programming mistakes novices make most often - for example, in Java: "they always confuse equality with assignment", or "they always call methods with the wrong types". These opinions are generally based solely on personal experience. We report a study to determine if programming educators form a consensus about which Java programming mistakes are the most common. We used the Blackbox data set to check whether the educators' opinions matched data from over 100,000 students - and checked whether this agreement was mediated by educators' experience. We found that educators formed only a weak consensus about which mistakes are most frequent, that their rankings bore only a moderate correspondence to the students in the Blackbox data, and that educators' experience had no effect on this level of agreement. These results raise questions about claims educators make regarding which errors students are most likely to commit

How hard is it to cross the room? -- Training (Recurrent) Neural Networks to steer a UAV

This work explores the feasibility of steering a drone with a (recurrent) neural network, based on input from a forward looking camera, in the context of a high-level navigation task. We set up a generic framework for training a network to perform navigation tasks based on imitation learning. It can be applied to both aerial and land vehicles. As a proof of concept we apply it to a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) in a simulated environment, learning to cross a room containing a number of obstacles. So far only feedforward neural networks (FNNs) have been used to train UAV control. To cope with more complex tasks, we propose the use of recurrent neural networks (RNN) instead and successfully train an LSTM (Long-Short Term Memory) network for controlling UAVs. Vision based control is a sequential prediction problem, known for its highly correlated input data. The correlation makes training a network hard, especially an RNN. To overcome this issue, we investigate an alternative sampling method during training, namely window-wise truncated backpropagation through time (WW-TBPTT). Further, end-to-end training requires a lot of data which often is not available. Therefore, we compare the performance of retraining only the Fully Connected (FC) and LSTM control layers with networks which are trained end-to-end. Performing the relatively simple task of crossing a room already reveals important guidelines and good practices for training neural control networks. Different visualizations help to explain the behavior learned.Comment: 12 pages, 30 figure