Leadership then at all events

Theory purporting to identify leadership remains over-determined by one of two underlying fallacies. Traditionally, it hypostatizes leadership in psychological terms so that it appears as the collection of attributes belonging to an independent, discrete person. By contrast, contemporary perspectives approach leadership by focusing on the intermediary relations between leaders and followers. We retreat from both of these conceptions. Our approach perceives these terms as continuous within each other and not merely as adjacent individuals. The upshot is that leadership should be understood as a more fundamental type of relatedness, one that is glimpsed in the active process we are here calling events. We suggest further work consistent with these ideas offers an innovative and useful line of inquiry, both by extending our theoretical understanding of leadership, but also because of the empirical challenges such a study invites

Back to Life: Leadership from a Process Perspective

Process thinking has given us signals regarding how to make critical judgements about, or else how to grasp actively and immanently, an organisational world on the move. The perspective of a world that is constantly changing draws our attention to the sensate feeling of time and to the creative use of the immediate past, which is no more and the immediate future, which is not yet, in our experience of the here and now. The current discussion uses the concept of process to contribute a more critical understanding of the actual occasion of leadership behaviour, anticipating this will offer both a route out of the popular obsession with individual leader-work and interactive studies of leadership as a predicate dependent on particular leaders and followers in interpersonal contexts, and toward the creative potential of leadership as process itsel

Back to Life: Leadership from a Process Perspective

Process thinking has given us signals regarding how to make critical judgements about, or else how to grasp actively and immanently, an organisational world on the move. The perspective of a world that is constantly changing draws our attention to the sensate feeling of time and to the creative use of the immediate past, which is no more and the immediate future, which is not yet, in our experience of the here and now. The current discussion uses the concept of process to contribute a more critical understanding of the actual occasion of leadership behaviour, anticipating this will offer both a route out of the popular obsession with individual leader-work and interactive studies of leadership as a predicate dependent on particular leaders and followers in interpersonal contexts, and toward the creative potential of leadership as process itsel

Fake News and Editing: Marketing Techniques used to Spin Controversies in Video Mediums

This thesis explores the topic of fake news in today\u27s digital landscape by analyzing how young adults (18-2) form and change prior opinions based on the media they consume. I measured this by showing respondents one of two bias montages in response to Google\u27s Project Owl initiative. Project Owl is Google\u27s controversial attempt to regulate false or abusive news by launching new feedback forms in addition to altering their algorithm in a way the company has not yet disclosed to the public (Sullivan). Each self-edited montage is two minutes in length and together they cover two radically different responses to Project Owl: one is positioned critically against the principles behind this move by Google, and one is clearly in support of the company\u27s project. To test the effects of spinning each video to change viewers\u27 perception of Project Owl, I developed a survey and designed a study to collect data from one-hundred people. Of the hundred people surveyed, half were randomly assigned to watch video A and half were randomly assigned to watch video B. Each participant was asked to answer a set of questions before and after watching their assigned video. The survey was designed to provide data on how their responses to Project Owl change after watching their assigned video. By using surveys that target the effects on audiences of informative video compilations that spin Project Owl, the thesis shows the manipulation of editing and short-form informational social media videos have on society more broadly. The intricate project is especially relevant because, while President Donald Trump regularly reprimands the promotion of fake news through Twitter, left-wing activists argue that false information spread across the Internet contributed to the outcome of the 2016 election. These arguments from opposing sides are intensified in the 21st century age of New Media and information overload, a period in media history when the fact that the production and circulation of news can come from anyone, anywhere, and at any time means that the difficulty of assessing the authenticity and reliability of that information is increasing exponentially

Back to Life: Leadership from a Process Perspective

Process thinking has given us signals regarding how to make critical judgements about, or else how to grasp actively and immanently, an organisational world on the move. The perspective of a world that is constantly changing draws our attention to the sensate feeling of time and to the creative use of the immediate past, which is no more and the immediate future, which is not yet, in our experience of the here and now. The current discussion uses the concept of process to contribute a more critical understanding of the actual occasion of leadership behaviour, anticipating this will offer both a route out of the popular obsession with individual leader-work and interactive studies of leadership as a predicate dependent on particular leaders and followers in interpersonal contexts, and toward the creative potential of leadership as process itself.

The dawn of mathematical biology

In this paper I describe the early development of the so-called mathematical biophysics, as conceived by Nicolas Rashevsky back in the 1920's, as well as his latter idealization of a "relational biology". I also underline that the creation of the journal "The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics" was instrumental in legitimating the efforts of Rashevsky and his students, and I finally argue that his pioneering efforts, while still largely unacknowledged, were vital for the development of important scientific contributions, most notably the McCulloch-Pitts model of neural networks.Comment: 9 pages, without figure

Conservation, Creation, and Evolution: Revising the Darwinian Project

There is hardly anything more central to our universe than conservation. Many scientific fields and disciplines view the law of conservation as one of the most fundamental universal laws. The Darwinian model pivots the process of evolution on variability, reproduction, and natural selection. Conservation plays a marginal role in this model and is not really universal, as the model allows exceptions to conservation, i.e. non-conservation, to play an equally important role in evolution. This anomalous role of conservation in the Darwinian model raises questions: What is the reason for this anomaly? Is conservation really universal, as we tend to believe or is it not, as the Darwinian model suggests? This contribution proposes a new model of evolution that focuses on levels of organization, rather than of species, organisms, or populations. It argues that conservation is central to evolution. Not only does this new model restores the universal status of conservation but it also makes possible to resolve some outstanding problems and controversies that continue to plague the Darwinian model. The article tries to advance the broad Darwinian project that seeks to explain the process of evolution as a product of the spontaneous processes in nature

The OODA loop and Salafi-Jihadi inspired home-grown terrorism: a tactic of asymmetric warfare

This thesis applied John Boyd’s Observe-Orientate-Decide-Act loop as an adaptable strategic model of terrorism to case study research methodology, to test the theory that Salafi-Jihadi inspired home-grown terrorism is a tactic of asymmetric warfare. The case studies examined al Qaeda’s adaptation into a dynamic, regenerative brand and its ability to penetrate Western moral boundaries. The concept of manoeuvring exploiting Western moral boundaries while simultaneously inspiring new followers is described as moral manoeuvrability

An exact approach for single machine scheduling with quadratic earliness and tardiness penalties

In this paper, we consider the single machine scheduling problem with quadratic earliness and tardiness costs, and no machine idle time. We propose two different lower bounds, as well as a lower bounding procedure that combines these two bounds. Optimal branch-and-bound algorithms are then presented. These algorithms incorporate the proposed lower bound, as well as an insertion-based dominance test. The lower bounding procedure and the branch-and-bound algorithms are tested on a wide set of randomly generated problems. The computational results show that the branch-and-bound algorithms are capable of optimally solving, within reasonable computation times, instances with up to 20 jobs.scheduling, single machine, quadratic earliness and tardiness, lower bounds, branch-and-bound