The span of correlations in dolphin whistle sequences

Long-range correlations are found in symbolic sequences from human language, music and DNA. Determining the span of correlations in dolphin whistle sequences is crucial for shedding light on their communicative complexity. Dolphin whistles share various statistical properties with human words, i.e. Zipf's law for word frequencies (namely that the probability of the ith most frequent word of a text is about i-a) and a parallel of the tendency of more frequent words to have more meanings. The finding of Zipf's law for word frequencies in dolphin whistles has been the topic of an intense debate on its implications. One of the major arguments against the relevance of Zipf's law in dolphin whistles is that it is not possible to distinguish the outcome of a die-rolling experiment from that of a linguistic or communicative source producing Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we show that statistically significant whistle–whistle correlations extend back to the second previous whistle in the sequence, using a global randomization test, and to the fourth previous whistle, using a local randomization test. None of these correlations are expected by a die-rolling experiment and other simple explanations of Zipf's law for word frequencies, such as Simon's model, that produce sequences of unpredictable elements.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Effect of Corruption on Household Final Consumption Expenditure in Nigeria 1980 - 2015

It is common knowledge that corruption is a threat to economic growth and development as it reduces the level of household final consumption expenditure. This study adopts OLS technique to examine the effects of corruption on household final consumption expenditure in Nigeria from 1980 to 2015. The result revealed that corruption has positive relationship with household final consumption expenditure in Nigeria and therefore statistically significant. The author recommends that Anti-corruption agencies and their personnel should be empowered  to discipline the culprits irrespective of their status. Finally, whistle blowing policy should be reinforced and sustained by both the incumbent and subsequent governments to minimize the menace of corruption in Nigeria. Keywords: Corruption, household final consumption expenditure, Nigeria, OL

Modelling the impact of organizationan structure and whistle blowers on intra-organizational corruption contagion

We complement the rich conceptual work on organizational corruption by quantitatively modeling the spread of corruption within organizations. We systematically vary four organizational culture-related parameters, i.e., organization structure, location of bad apples, employees’ propensity to become corrupted (“corruption probability”), and number of whistle-blowers. Our simulation studies find that in organizations with flatter structures, corruption permeates the organization at a lower threshold value of corruption probability compared to those with taller structures. However, the final proportion of corrupted individuals is higher in the latter as compared to the former. Also, we find that for a 1,000-strong organization, 5% of the workforce is a critical threshold in terms of the number of whistle-blowers needed to constrain the spread of corruption, and if this number is around 25%, the corruption contagion is negligible. Implications of our results are discussed

Ethical reasoning as contextual predictor of whistle-blowing intention / Saidah Hamizah Ahmad, Mohamad Amirul Ahmad Buniamin and Mohd Farid Mohd Mahali

The move toward better public governance exacerbates the conditions leading to instances of whistle-blowing. The initial prediction of this paper was ethical failure is the ground reason for organizational collapse. This paper provides an analysis of ethical reasoning as an indicator to whistle-blowing intention in Public Sector. The study uses data from questionnaire received from 242 respondents of public agencies in Klang valley for the year 2013. Of greatest importance is the finding that ethical reasoning strongly influences whistle-blowing intention among public servants due to the inherent ethical standing of the individual. Our final analysis calls for the need to refine this research by enumerating the role of culture as a moderating variable in future research

“We got more yesterday than anybody”: Child Ghosts and the National Trauma of Anti-Black Racism in American Literature

This thesis examines the roles of haunting in the context of racial violence in three texts: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, and Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan. In each of these texts, a parent is responsible for the death of a child. In the former two texts, both by Black authors, a Black parent kills a Black child in what they believe to be a protective act in the face of violence by white people. Wolf Whistle, however, written by a white author, is animated by the ghost of a character based on Emmett Till. In this case, a white parent kills a Black child in an act of disciplinary violence intended to reinforce the boundaries between whiteness and Blackness. The reasons that children die and return as ghosts in these three texts shape the way that haunting functions. In the first two novels, haunting forces a reckoning with cultural trauma in order to facilitate communal healing. In the final novel, haunting aids in the problematization of whiteness and in the amelioration of white guilt—guilt which results from feelings of complicity in anti-Black violence

Beluga whale (Delphinapterus leucas) vocalizations and call classification from the eastern Beaufort Sea population

Funding was provided by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management under InterAgency Agreement M09PG00016. E.C.G. was supported by a National Research Council (National Academy of Sciences) Postdoctoral Fellowship.Beluga whales, Delphinapterus leucas, have a graded call system; call types exist on a continuum making classification challenging. A description of vocalizations from the eastern Beaufort Sea beluga population during its spring migration are presented here, using both a non-parametric clas- sification tree analysis (CART), and a Random Forest analysis. Twelve frequency and duration measurements were made on 1019 calls recorded over 14 days off Icy Cape, Alaska, resulting in 34 identifiable call types with 83% agreement in classification for both CART and Random Forest analyses. This high level of agreement in classification, with an initial subjective classification of calls into 36 categories, demonstrates that the methods applied here provide a quantitative analysis of a graded call dataset. Further, as calls cannot be attributed to individuals using single sensor pas- sive acoustic monitoring efforts, these methods provide a comprehensive analysis of data where the influence of pseudo-replication of calls from individuals is unknown. This study is the first to describe the vocal repertoire of a beluga population using a robust and repeatable methodology. A baseline eastern Beaufort Sea beluga population repertoire is presented here, against which the call repertoire of other seasonally sympatric Alaskan beluga populations can be compared.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Auditory training records for the preschool deaf and severely hard of hearing.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University 2 disk recordings. In Audio-Visual Library

La cooperación Euro-Latinoamericana contra la corrupción y su impacto en los Derechos Humanos

Under the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), as well as under regional conventions, Latin-American and European States are strengthening their efforts to combat corruption by, among other measures, consolidating their international cooperation. Building on the increasingly acknowledged impact of corruption on human rights, this paper explores how the substantive link between corruption and human rights could be unfolded to develop cooperation strategies against corruption with a positive impact on human rights. It does it using as examples a selection of initiatives of inter-regional cooperation against corruption between Europe and Latin-America.Los países de América Latina y Europa han venido fortaleciendo sus esfuerzos contra la corrupción en el marco de la Convención de las Naciones Unidas contra la Corrupción, así como de instrumentos regionales contra la corrupción, entre otras medidas consolidando la cooperación internacional. Partiendo del creciente reconocimiento del impacto de la corrupción en los derechos humanos, este artículo explora de qué manera la conexión entre corrupción y derechos humanos puede utilizarse para conseguir que las medidas anticorrupción tengan consecuencias positivas en materia de derechos humanos. El análisis que aquí se presenta se apoya para ello en una selección de iniciativas de cooperación contra la corrupción en las que participan países europeos y latinoamericanos

A study on the effect of a web-based teaching module and gender on accounting students’ ethical judgements

Accounting educators face the increasingly important task of teaching ethics. Yet, there is little empirical evidence on the effectiveness of different ethics instructional methods on accounting students’ ethical judgements. This study examines whether the ethical decision making of accounting students differs (1) between those instructed through a web-based teaching module and those adopting a more traditional textbook-focused approach, and (2) between gender. A total of 156 students from a second-year financial accounting course participated in the study, with 90 students utilising the web-based module which was designed based on Rest’s (1979) model on ethics development. The other 66 students were instructed through a more traditional teaching approach based on regular class discussions using the ethical problems presented in the textbook. Subsequently, when presented with a whistle-blowing situation, the results of the study suggest that the attitudes and judgements of students instructed through the web-based module were more ethical than those utilising the traditional textbook module. Further, gender was found to impact ethical judgements but only among students who were exposed to the web-based module. The implications of the findings on accounting ethics education are discussed