Ethical preferences for influencing superiors: A 41-society study

With a 41-society sample of 9990 managers and professionals, we used hierarchical linear modeling to investigate the impact of both macro-level and micro-level predictors on subordinate influence ethics. While we found that both macro-level and micro-level predictors contributed to the model definition, we also found global agreement for a subordinate influence ethics hierarchy. Thus our findings provide evidence that developing a global model of subordinate ethics is possible, and should be based upon multiple criteria and multilevel variables

The Efficiency of Infants' Exploratory Play Is Related to Longer-Term Cognitive Development

In this longitudinal study we examined the stability of exploratory play in infancy and its relation to cognitive development in early childhood. We assessed infants' (N = 130, mean age at enrollment = 12.02 months, SD = 3.5 months; range: 5-19 months) exploratory play four times over 9 months. Exploratory play was indexed by infants' attention to novelty, inductive generalizations, efficiency of exploration, face preferences, and imitative learning. We assessed cognitive development at the fourth visit for the full sample, and again at age three for a subset of the sample (n = 38). The only measure that was stable over infancy was the efficiency of exploration. Additionally, infants' efficiency score predicted vocabulary size and distinguished at-risk infants recruited from early intervention sites from those not at risk. Follow-up analyses at age three provided additional evidence for the importance of the efficiency measure: more efficient exploration was correlated with higher IQ scores. These results suggest that the efficiency of infants' exploratory play can be informative about longer-term cognitive development.Simons FoundationJohn Merck Scholar AwardNational Science Foundation (U.S.). Faculty Early Career Development Program (award)National Science Foundation (U.S.). Science and Technology Center (grant from the Center for Brains Minds, and Machines (CBMM))National Science Foundation (U.S.). Science and Technology Center (award CCF-1231216

Quasiperiodic circuit quantum electrodynamics

Superconducting circuits are an extremely versatile platform to realize quantum information hardware and to emulate topological materials. We here show how a simple arrangement of capacitors and conventional superconductor-insulator-superconductor junctions can realize an even broader class of systems, in the form of a nonlinear capacitive element which is quasiperiodic with respect to the quantized Cooper-pair charge. Our setup allows to create protected Dirac points defined in the transport degrees of freedom, whose presence leads to a suppression of the classical finite-frequency current noise. Furthermore, the quasiperiodicity can emulate Anderson localization in charge space, measurable via vanishing charge quantum fluctuations. The realization by means of the macroscopic transport degrees of freedom allows for a straightforward generalization to arbitrary dimensions and implements truly non-interacting versions of the considered models. As an outlook, we discuss potential ideas to simulate a transport version of the magic-angle effect known from twisted bilayer graphene.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figure