The Perceived Impact of Geographically Dispersed Work Teams On Job Attitudes

With the increase in technology and pace of communication in a global business economy, organizations are adopting geographically dispersed business models that leverage a series of scaled work arrangements designed to enhance efficiency and cost-effectiveness. These arrangements include work teams that consist of agents who work in a traditional office but also employees who work from a home or satellite office. This qualitative study investigated perceived impact of geographic proximity to the office on job attitudes. Communication theory informed the framework of this ethnographic study and qualitative interviews. Results indicated that members of a dispersed team adopt a broad definition of their workgroup and decline in their motivation to maintain, or pursue, more intimate relationships. Findings also show that dispersed workgroups had lower levels of organizational identity and trust. This study found that proximity and its impact on job attitudes was not as important as other organizational variables, such as strength of communication and the presence of leadership

Teaching Ethics: Expanding Ethical Perspectives By Cultivating Moral Imagination

Moral imagination (MI) is described as the ability to challenge operative worldviews in order to discover new ways of framing ethical problems and moral perspective taking. Because operative worldviews can contain implicit bias, MI helps individuals reach beyond their own ways of knowing to seek alternative perspectives and find innovative ways to solve ethical problems. This article describes a graduate level ethics curriculum designed to develop moral imagination in leadership students, and ultimately help them make ethical decisions within the context of their organizations. The article also reports results of a concurrent, evaluative qualitative study designed to gather student reflections as they attempt to learn and apply moral imagination in practice

The Perceived Relationship Between Leadership Practices and Job Attitudes In Human Service organizations

This paper contributes to leadership knowledge in the field of child welfare by studying the relationship between agency leadership and caseworker job attitudes. This qualitative study included three focus groups with administrators and caseworkers to explore perceived leadership practices and caseworker job attitudes. Qualitative findings revealed a divergent perception of leadership practices between caseworkers and administrators, while providing specific content representative of both strengths and limitations of agency leadership. Lastly, frontline workers exclusively also perceived a relationship between certain leadership practices and job satisfaction. Findings lead to a number of organizational implications

Equivalence-based Security for Querying Encrypted Databases: Theory and Application to Privacy Policy Audits

Motivated by the problem of simultaneously preserving confidentiality and usability of data outsourced to third-party clouds, we present two different database encryption schemes that largely hide data but reveal enough information to support a wide-range of relational queries. We provide a security definition for database encryption that captures confidentiality based on a notion of equivalence of databases from the adversary's perspective. As a specific application, we adapt an existing algorithm for finding violations of privacy policies to run on logs encrypted under our schemes and observe low to moderate overheads.Comment: CCS 2015 paper technical report, in progres

Querying an Object-Oriented Database Using CPL

The Collection Programming Language is based on a complex value model of data and has successfully been used for querying transforming and integrating data from a wide variety of structured data sources - relational, ACeDB, and ASN.1 among others. However, since there is no notion of objects and classes in CPL, it cannot adequately model recursive types or inheritance, and hence cannot be used to query object-oriented databases (OODBs). By adding a reference type and four operations to CPL - dereference, method invocation, identity test and class type cast - it is possible to express a large class of interesting safe queries against OODBs. As an example of how the extended CPL can be used to query an OODB, we will describe how the extended language has been used as a query interface to Shore databases

The magnetoelectrochemical switch

In the field of spintronics, the archetype solid-state two-terminal device is the spin valve, where the resistance is controlled by the magnetization configuration. We show here how this concept of spin-dependent switch can be extended to magnetic electrodes in solution, by magnetic control of their chemical environment. Appropriate nanoscale design allows a huge enhancement of the magnetic force field experienced by paramagnetic molecular species in solutions, which changes between repulsive and attractive on changing the electrodes' magnetic orientations. Specifically, the field gradient force created within a sub-100-nm-sized nanogap separating two magnetic electrodes can be reversed by changing the orientation of the electrodes' magnetization relative to the current flowing between the electrodes. This can result in a breaking or making of an electric nanocontact, with a change of resistance by a factor of up to 103. The results reveal how an external field can impact chemical equilibrium in the vicinity of nanoscale magnetic circuits

Energy levels and decoherence properties of single electron and nuclear spins in a defect center in diamond

The coherent behavior of the single electron and single nuclear spins of a defect center in diamond and a 13C nucleus in its vicinity, respectively, are investigated. The energy levels associated with the hyperfine coupling of the electron spin of the defect center to the 13C nuclear spin are analyzed. Methods of magnetic resonance together with optical readout of single defect centers have been applied in order to observe the coherent dynamics of the electron and nuclear spins. Long coherence times, in the order of microseconds for electron spins and tens of microseconds for nuclear spins, recommend the studied system as a good experimental approach for implementing a 2-qubit gate.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Irreducible Killing Tensors from Third Rank Killing-Yano Tensors

We investigate higher rank Killing-Yano tensors showing that third rank Killing-Yano tensors are not always trivial objects being possible to construct irreducible Killing tensors from them. We give as an example the Kimura IIC metric were from two rank Killing-Yano tensors we obtain a reducible Killing tensor and from third rank Killing-Yano tensors we obtain three Killing tensors, one reducible and two irreducible.Comment: 10 page