Human Nature and Teaching Management Theories

Ghoshal (2005) spurred considerable discussion with his pronouncement that “Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices,” using agency theory to exemplify how theories with negative assumptions about people perpetuate the behaviors that inspired those assumptions. According to Ghoshal, teaching that managers maximize their own interests legitimizes such behavior to students, therefore shaping future norms. This article proposes to summarize and respond to Ghoshal’s arguments, then discuss the implications for pedagogy and make recommendations, emphasizing that although secular management teaching can improve, only by incorporating a Christian view of human nature can management students develop an accurate and ethical worldview

Bridging General Education and the Business Discipline: Surfacing Central Themes through a Core Course

General education and business major courses often follow parallel paths with little intersection or appreciation of the other. Students benefit, however, by seeing key themes and skills linked to both general education and specialized disciplinary courses. Giving specific attention to Christian institutions, this paper argues for more intentional connections between these two parts of the curriculum, highlighting their common ideals of shared learning, shared connections as human beings, practical skills, institutional distinctiveness, and integration. One strategy to overcome the bifurcation of general education and business curricula has been to ground institutional distinctives within a core course experience, which can then be called to mind in subsequent courses. A core course for first-year students is especially effective for Christian institutions due to the significance of the themes typically introduced in such a course. Although educators have called for building connections between general education and specialized disciplines, very little scholarship has addressed business disciplines specifically or provided models of successful implementation. The present article provides a detailed example of how one Christian institution’s core course can engage and benefit students by highlighting connections to organizational and career themes. The article then demonstrates concrete ways important core course themes can be intentionally reinforced within the business curriculum. General suggestions for implementation are also provided

GeneFishing to reconstruct context specific portraits of biological processes.

Rapid advances in genomic technologies have led to a wealth of diverse data, from which novel discoveries can be gleaned through the application of robust statistical and computational methods. Here, we describe GeneFishing, a semisupervised computational approach to reconstruct context-specific portraits of biological processes by leveraging gene-gene coexpression information. GeneFishing incorporates multiple high-dimensional statistical ideas, including dimensionality reduction, clustering, subsampling, and results aggregation, to produce robust results. To illustrate the power of our method, we applied it using 21 genes involved in cholesterol metabolism as "bait" to "fish out" (or identify) genes not previously identified as being connected to cholesterol metabolism. Using simulation and real datasets, we found that the results obtained through GeneFishing were more interesting for our study than those provided by related gene prioritization methods. In particular, application of GeneFishing to the GTEx liver RNA sequencing (RNAseq) data not only reidentified many known cholesterol-related genes, but also pointed to glyoxalase I (GLO1) as a gene implicated in cholesterol metabolism. In a follow-up experiment, we found that GLO1 knockdown in human hepatoma cell lines increased levels of cellular cholesterol ester, validating a role for GLO1 in cholesterol metabolism. In addition, we performed pantissue analysis by applying GeneFishing on various tissues and identified many potential tissue-specific cholesterol metabolism-related genes. GeneFishing appears to be a powerful tool for identifying related components of complex biological systems and may be used across a wide range of applications

Electron-correlation effects in appearance-potential spectra of Ni

Spin-resolved and temperature-dependent appearance-potential spectra of ferromagnetic Nickel are measured and analyzed theoretically. The Lander self-convolution model which relates the line shape to the unoccupied part of the local density of states turns out to be insufficient. Electron correlations and orbitally resolved transition-matrix elements are shown to be essential for a quantitative agreement between experiment and theory.Comment: LaTeX, 6 pages, 2 eps figures included, Phys. Rev. B (in press

Introduction to Human Development (GHC)

This Grants Collection for Introduction to Human Development was created under a Round Nine ALG Textbook Transformation Grant. Affordable Learning Georgia Grants Collections are intended to provide faculty with the frameworks to quickly implement or revise the same materials as a Textbook Transformation Grants team, along with the aims and lessons learned from project teams during the implementation process. Documents are in .pdf format, with a separate .docx (Word) version available for download. Each collection contains the following materials: Linked Syllabus Initial Proposal Final Reporthttps://oer.galileo.usg.edu/psychology-collections/1023/thumbnail.jp

Fluctuations of company yearly profits versus scaled revenue: Fat tail distribution of Levy type

We analyze annual revenues and earnings data for the 500 largest-revenue U.S. companies during the period 1954-2007. We find that mean year profits are proportional to mean year revenues, exception made for few anomalous years, from which we postulate a linear relation between company expected mean profit and revenue. Mean annual revenues are used to scale both company profits and revenues. Annual profit fluctuations are obtained as difference between actual annual profit and its expected mean value, scaled by a power of the revenue to get a stationary behavior as a function of revenue. We find that profit fluctuations are broadly distributed having approximate power-law tails with a Levy-type exponent $\alpha \simeq 1.7$, from which we derive the associated break-even probability distribution. The predictions are compared with empirical data.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Apolipoprotein E (APOE) genotype regulates body weight and fatty acid utilization—Studies in gene-targeted replacement mice

Scope Of the three human apolipoprotein E (APOE) alleles, the ε3 allele is most common, which may be a result of adaptive evolution. In this study, we investigated whether the APOE genotype affects body weight and energy metabolism through regulation of fatty acid utilization. Methods and results Targeted replacement mice expressing the human APOE3 were significantly heavier on low- and high-fat diets compared to APOE4 mice. Particularly on high-fat feeding, food intake and dietary energy yields as well as fat mass were increased in APOE3 mice. Fatty acid mobilization determined as activation of adipose tissue lipase and fasting plasma nonesterified fatty acid levels were significantly lower in APOE3 than APOE4 mice. APOE4 mice, in contrast, exhibited higher expression of proteins involved in fatty acid oxidation in skeletal muscle. Conclusion Our data suggest that APOE3 is associated with the potential to more efficiently harvest dietary energy and to deposit fat in adipose tissue, while APOE4 carriers tend to increase fatty acid mobilization and utilization as fuel substrates especially under high-fat intake. The different handling of dietary energy may have contributed to the evolution and worldwide distribution of the ε3 allele

Microwave Assisted Synthesis of Py-Im Polyamides

Microwave synthesis was utilized to rapidly build Py-Im polyamides in high yields and purity using Boc-protection chemistry on Kaiser oxime resin. A representative polyamide targeting the 5′-WGWWCW-3′ (W = A or T) subset of the consensus Androgen and Glucocorticoid Response Elements was synthesized in 56% yield after 20 linear steps and HPLC purification. It was confirmed by Mosher amide derivatization of the polyamide that a chiral α-amino acid does not racemize after several additional coupling steps