When the Dark Shines: The role of dark personality traits in leadership role occupancy and hiring decisions in a collectivistic culture

Two studies investigated the role of the Dark Triad traits (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism), conscientiousness, and intelligence on leadership role occupancy and hiring decisions in Indonesian culture, which is a collectivist culture. Study 1 used Generalized Linear Model to examine two groups of participants with (i.e., school principals) and without (i.e., teachers) significant leadership responsibilities by controlling for participant grouping by school. The results indicated that, in comparison with teachers, school principals had significantly higher narcissism and conscientiousness and lower psychopathy and intelligence. In study 2, video recordings of simulated job interviews of 133 undergraduates were evaluated by 133 professional recruiters. Interviewee narcissism was the only significant positive predictor for hiring decision. Both studies provide consistent evidence that narcissism is a significant positive factor in both leadership role occupancy and hiring decision in a collectivist culture

Processing Plant Diseases Using Transformer Model

Agriculture faces challenges in achieving high-yield production while minimizing the use of chemicals. The excessive use of chemicals in agriculture poses many problems. Accurate disease diagnosis is crucial for effective plant disease detection and treatment. Automatic identification of plant diseases using computer vision techniques offers new and efficient approaches compared to traditional methods. Transformers, a type of deep learning model, have shown great promise in computer vision, but as the technology is still new, many vision transformer models struggle to identify diseases by examining the entire leaf. This paper aims to utilize the vision transformer model in analyzing and identifying common diseases that hinder the growth and development of plants through the plant leave images. Besides, it aims to improve the model's stability by focusing more on the entire leaf than individual parts and generalizing better results on leaves not in the image center. Added features such as Shift Patch Tokenization, Locality Self Attention, and Positional Encoding help focus on the whole leaf. The final test accuracy obtained is 89.58%, with relatively slight variances in precision, accuracy, and F1 score across classes, as well as satisfactory model robustness towards changes in leaf orientation and position within the image. The model's effectiveness shows the vision transformer's potential for automated plant disease diagnosis, which can help farmers take timely measures to prevent losses and ensure food security

Sovereign Bankruptcy: Why Now and Why Not in the IMF

As the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis that began in 2009 continues to run its course, leaving massive economic dislocation in its wake, and as NML Capital, Ltd. v. Republic of Argentina makes its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, this Note discusses the timely and persistent problem of sovereign debt crises and the many impediments to their orderly resolution. This Note evaluates various proposals for dealing with sovereign debt-crisis resolution and concludes that a multilateral treaty-based sovereign bankruptcy regime, institutionally independent from the International Monetary Fund, offers the best solution. The status quo—messy, inefficient, and unpredictable ad hoc negotiations—has consistently proven inadequate. Ex ante contractual devices and piecemeal statutory fixes in domestic law offer at best incremental solutions that can do little to alter the fundamental problems with the present state of affairs. Just as domestic bankruptcy law complements the law of creditor remedies due to the shortcomings of the latter, so too should a system of international bankruptcy law complement the law of creditor remedies vis-à-vis sovereign debtors. This Note argues that, although this approach may be difficult to achieve, that does not justify abandoning it

Why Chromatic Imaging Matters

During the last two decades, the first generation of beam combiners at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer has proved the importance of optical interferometry for high-angular resolution astrophysical studies in the near- and mid-infrared. With the advent of 4-beam combiners at the VLTI, the u-v coverage per pointing increases significantly, providing an opportunity to use reconstructed images as powerful scientific tools. Therefore, interferometric imaging is already a key feature of the new generation of VLTI instruments, as well as for other interferometric facilities like CHARA and JWST. It is thus imperative to account for the current image reconstruction capabilities and their expected evolutions in the coming years. Here, we present a general overview of the current situation of optical interferometric image reconstruction with a focus on new wavelength-dependent information, highlighting its main advantages and limitations. As an Appendix we include several cookbooks describing the usage and installation of several state-of-the art image reconstruction packages. To illustrate the current capabilities of the software available to the community, we recovered chromatic images, from simulated MATISSE data, using the MCMC software SQUEEZE. With these images, we aim at showing the importance of selecting good regularization functions and their impact on the reconstruction.Comment: Accepted for publication in Experimental Astronomy as part of the topical collection: Future of Optical-infrared Interferometry in Europ

Markets for technology (why do we see them, why don't we see more of them and why we should care)

This essay explores the nature, the functioning, and the economic and policy implications of markets for technology. Today, the outsourcing of research and development activities is more common than in the past, and specialized technology suppliers have emerged in many industries. In a sense, the Schumpeterian vision of integrating R&D with manufacturing and distribution is being confronted by the older Smithian vision of division of labor. The existence and efficacy of markets for technology can profoundly influence the creation and diffusion of new knowledge, and hence, economic growth of countries and the competitive position of companies. The economic and managerial literatures have touched upon some aspects of the nature of these markets. However, a thorough understanding of how markets for technology work is still lacking. In this essay we address two main questions. First, what are the factors that enable a market for technology to exist and function effectively? Specifically we look at the role of industry structure, the nature of knowledge, and intellectual property rights and related institutions. Second, we ask what the implications of such markets are for the boundaries of the firm, the specialization and division of labor in the economy, industry structure, and economic growth. We build on this discussion to develop the implications of our work for public policy and corporate strategy

Why we measure period fertility

Four reasons for measuring period fertility are distinguished: to explain fertility time trends, to anticipate future fertility, to construct theoretical models and to communicate with non-specialist audiences. The paper argues that not all measures are suitable for each purpose, and that tempo adjustment may be appropriate for some objectives but not others. In particular, it is argued that genuine timing effects do not bias or distort measures of period fertility as dependent variable. Several different concepts of bias or distortion are identified in relation to period fertility measures. Synthetic cohort indicators are a source of confusion since they conflate measurement and forecasting. Anticipating future fertility is more akin to forecasting than to measurement. Greater clarity about concepts and measures in the fertility arena could be achieved by a stronger emphasis on validation. Period incidence and occurrence-exposure rates have a straightforward interpretation. More complex period fertility measures are meaningful only if a direct or indirect criterion can be specified against which to evaluate them. Their performance against that criterion is what establishes them as valid or useful

Why study movement variability in autism?

Autism has been defined as a disorder of social cognition, interaction and communication where ritualistic, repetitive behaviors are commonly observed. But how should we understand the behavioral and cognitive differences that have been the main focus of so much autism research? Can high-level cognitive processes and behaviors be identified as the core issues people with autism face, or do these characteristics perhaps often rather reflect individual attempts to cope with underlying physiological issues? Much research presented in this volume will point to the latter possibility, i.e. that people on the autism spectrum cope with issues at much lower physiological levels pertaining not only to Central Nervous Systems (CNS) function, but also to peripheral and autonomic systems (PNS, ANS) (Torres, Brincker, et al. 2013). The question that we pursue in this chapter is what might be fruitful ways of gaining objective measures of the large-scale systemic and heterogeneous effects of early atypical neurodevelopment; how to track their evolution over time and how to identify critical changes along the continuum of human development and aging. We suggest that the study of movement variability—very broadly conceived as including all minute fluctuations in bodily rhythms and their rates of change over time (coined micro-movements (Figure 1A-B) (Torres, Brincker, et al. 2013))—offers a uniquely valuable and entirely objectively quantifiable lens to better assess, understand and track not only autism but cognitive development and degeneration in general. This chapter presents the rationale firstly behind this focus on micro-movements and secondly behind the choice of specific kinds of data collection and statistical metrics as tools of analysis (Figure 1C). In brief the proposal is that the micro-movements (defined in Part I – Chapter 1), obtained using various time scales applied to different physiological data-types (Figure 1), contain information about layered influences and temporal adaptations, transformations and integrations across anatomically semi-independent subsystems that crosstalk and interact. Further, the notion of sensorimotor re-afference is used to highlight the fact that these layered micro-motions are sensed and that this sensory feedback plays a crucial role in the generation and control of movements in the first place. In other words, the measurements of various motoric and rhythmic variations provide an access point not only to the “motor systems”, but also access to much broader central and peripheral sensorimotor and regulatory systems. Lastly, we posit that this new lens can also be used to capture influences from systems of multiple entry points or collaborative control and regulation, such as those that emerge during dyadic social interactions

Why we Ask Why: The Ways in Which Control and Stereotyping Biases Affect Internal Attributions

Since the idea of attributions was famously discussed by Fritz Heider (1958), a wide array of empirical research has focused on the phenomenon. Included within the sphere of attributional theories are internal attributions, which have been of particular interest to the psychological community for decades. Although there is no comprehensive theory for why people make these attributions, literature points to establishing control as a possible motivator. In addition, research suggests that people may make more extreme internal attributions about minorities, particularly when they are not aware they are relying on stereotypes. Participants (N = 377) observed a modified version of the quizmaster paradigm (Ross, Amabile & Steinmetz, 1977), which relies on the Fundamental Attribution Error. They first completed a control manipulation that either deprived their sense of person control or left it unaffected. Then, they watched a video depicting the quizmaster paradigm with either a black contestant or a white contestant. After the video, they rated quizmasters, contestants and themselves based on intelligence. Although the quizmaster paradigm proved to be robust, neither Race nor Control affected the strength of the internal attributions participants made. The lack of significant findings suggest that further research needs to be conducted to ascertain the causality of internal attributions