Conflict in cross-functional IT project teams: The amplifying roles of functional background diversity

Conflicts pervade IT project teams and can be detrimental to team performance. Team diversity affects conflicts and team performance but its role is ambivalent. The moderating role of functional background diversity (FBD) on conflicts and team performance is explored via a hierarchical linear modelling analysis of 200 participants from 41 cross-functional IT project teams. Results corroborate the complexity of relationships between diversity, conflict, and performance by showing that the effect of FBD is contingent on the type of conflicts: FBD does not heighten the adverse effect of relationship conflicts on team performance, but it does amplify the detrimental effect of task conflicts. The study provides evidence that diversity attributes can play a moderating rather than a direct or mediating role on team performance. Moreover, the study’s systematic and combined application of several conceptual and methodological recommendations addresses limitations of past studies and underscores the importance of adopting a more nuanced and rigorous approach to examining diversity in teams

Book review: Russia and the European Court of Human Rights: the Strasbourg effect edited by Lauri Mälksoo and Wolfgang Benedek

In Russia and the European Court of Human Rights: The Strasbourg Effect, Lauri Mälksoo and Wolfgang Benedek bring together fifteen established European European lawyers, judges and human rights scholars to explore interactions between Russia and the European Court of Human Rights in the twenty years since Russia ratified the European Convention on Human Rights. Anyone interested in human rights, legal thinking and issues of sovereignty in Russia will welcome the insights found in this valuable, well-researched volume, writes Camille-Renaud Merlen

Russia and the question of world order

There is broad agreement among commentators and analysts that Russia seeks to undermine the US-led liberal international order. At the same time, there is considerable disagreement over the nature and extent of the challenge Moscow poses, the underlying drivers of Russian revisionism, and how the West should respond. In this article, we argue that it is possible to distinguish between three major perspectives. In brief, the first suggests that Russia is a ‘revanchist power’ that seeks to overturn the very foundations of the liberal world order. The second perspective holds that Russia is a ‘defensive power’ that works for incremental changes within the existing order. The third perspective contends that Russia is an ‘aggressive isolationist’, meaning that the Putin regime deliberately plays a spoiler role in international affairs to boost its domestic legitimacy. This article describes in detail the arguments of the three perspectives; it shows that each suffers from explanatory shortcomings and defects; and it outlines how the contributions to this special issue address the identified shortcomings

H9N2 avian influenza virus in a Mediterranean gull

International audienc

A snow cover climatology for the Pyrenees from MODIS snow products

International audienceThe seasonal snow in the Pyrenees is critical for hydropower production, crop irrigation and tourism in France, Spain and Andorra. Complementary to in situ observations , satellite remote sensing is useful to monitor the effect of climate on the snow dynamics. The MODIS daily snow products (Terra/MOD10A1 and Aqua/MYD10A1) are widely used to generate snow cover climatologies, yet it is preferable to assess their accuracies prior to their use. Here, we use both in situ snow observations and remote sensing data to evaluate the MODIS snow products in the Pyrenees. First, we compare the MODIS products to in situ snow depth (SD) and snow water equivalent (SWE) measurements. We estimate the values of the SWE and SD best detection thresholds to 40 mm water equivalent (w.e.) and 150 mm, respectively , for both MOD10A1 and MYD10A1. κ coefficients are within 0.74 and 0.92 depending on the product and the variable for these thresholds. However, we also find a seasonal trend in the optimal SWE and SD thresholds, reflecting the hysteresis in the relationship between the depth of the snow-pack (or SWE) and its extent within a MODIS pixel. Then, a set of Landsat images is used to validate MOD10A1 and MYD10A1 for 157 dates between 2002 and 2010. The resulting accuracies are 97 % (κ = 0.85) for MOD10A1 and 96 % (κ = 0.81) for MYD10A1, which indicates a good agreement between both data sets. The effect of vegetation on the results is analyzed by filtering the forested areas using a land cover map. As expected, the accuracies decrease over the forests but the agreement remains acceptable (MOD10A1: 96 %, κ = 0.77; MYD10A1: 95 %, κ = 0.67). We conclude that MODIS snow products have a sufficient accuracy for hy-droclimate studies at the scale of the Pyrenees range. Using a gap-filling algorithm we generate a consistent snow cover climatology, which allows us to compute the mean monthly snow cover duration per elevation band and aspect classes. There is snow on the ground at least 50 % of the time above 1600 m between December and April. We finally analyze the snow patterns for the atypical winter 2011–2012. Snow cover duration anomalies reveal a deficient snowpack on the Span-ish side of the Pyrenees, which seems to have caused a drop in the national hydropower production

Eikonal phase retrieval: Unleashing the fourth generation sources potential for enhanced propagation based tomography on biological samples

The evolution of synchrotrons towards higher brilliance beams has increased the possible sample-to-detector propagation distances for which the source confusion circle does not lead to geometrical blurring. This makes it possible to push near-field propagation driven phase contrast enhancement to the limit, revealing low contrast features which would otherwise remain hidden under an excessive noise-to-signal ratio. Until today this possibility was hindered, in most objects of scientific interest, by the simultaneous presence of strong phase gradient regions and low contrast features. The strong gradients, when enhanced with the now possible long propagation distances, induce such strong phase effects that the linearisation assumptions of current state-of-the-art single-distance phase retrieval filters are broken, and the resulting image quality is jeopardized. Our work provides an innovative algorithm which efficiently performs the phase retrieval task over the entire near-field range, producing images of exceptional quality for mixed objects