Jester’s role in organizational ideation:“you don’t have to be serious to be taken seriously”

Abstract. The objective of this study is to examine is there a clear meaning with managers using jestering to enhance organizational ideation. Moreover, the research focuses on jestering and aims to understand the phenomenon of jester as an organizational phenomenon. The research question: “What is jester role’s meaning in increasing ideation and creativity in organizations?” is answered via one sub-question, which examines how the role of a jester is reflected by others in organizational creativity. This study contributes to idea generation processes, humor and jester research, ideation research and creative organization research. This study is a qualitative research employing in-depth interviews with abductive research approach, where the theoretical framework is a base for the empirical study, but it is modified during the research. The empirical data was gathered from six interviews, consisting of three managers and three specialists. The study uses in-depth interviews as primary source of data. Abductive logic was used to conduct scientific reasoning in this study. Based on the findings of this research, jester role has remarkable role on ideation and in building organizational trust. When employees feel organizational trust and sense of agency, employees are more interested in bringing forth their ideas and participative in ideation. Jesters facilitate new ways of thinking and develop organizational culture towards more permissive attitude. Findings also indicate that jester role adopted by managers should be constructive and goal-oriented in order for bringing successful results in ideation. In the empirical findings it was shown that managers do not avoid jester role due to pressure or fear of decreasing career opportunities, but rather use the role to gain benefits on an organizational or group level. This research also found that managers in fact have a good comprehension on creativity, but they suffer from lack of time to prepare and invest in creativity and feel the pressure of organizational norms to use deviance and humor. It seems that managers taking jester role should seek to build an atmosphere where everyone is committed in generating ideas. Jester role should be a shared role, so that it does not settle permanently on anyone’s shoulders alone. In ideation, managers should focus on preparing and guiding the ideation. Constructive and goal-oriented jester role requires managers to also have sensitivity and emotional intelligence, but also interest to making sure others are good to be. Once managers have gained trust and have built a relationship with subordinates, they are more aware how to express divergent opinions and what kind of humor works. The findings in this research suggest organizations to develop organizational culture to support ideation. In addition, the findings help managers to better understand the importance and value of using jester role in ideation. This research suggests leadership training where managers learn to use jester role consciously and learn to break from organizational boundaries while being aligned with organization’s objectives. Therefore, it provides insight for managers and organizations that wish to be a creative organization

Disruption of the three-body gravitational systems: Lifetime statistics

We investigate statistics of the decay process in the equal-mass three-body problem with randomized initial conditions. Contrary to earlier expectations of similarity with "radioactive decay", the lifetime distributions obtained in our numerical experiments turn out to be heavy-tailed, i.e. the tails are not exponential, but algebraic. The computed power-law index for the differential distribution is within the narrow range, approximately from -1.7 to -1.4, depending on the virial coefficient. Possible applications of our results to studies of the dynamics of triple stars known to be at the edge of disruption are considered.Comment: 13 pages, 2 tables, 3 figure

Decoding Human Hematopoietic Stem Cell Self-Renewal

Purpose of Review: Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) maintain blood and immune cell homeostasis by balancing quiescence, self-renewal, and differentiation. HSCs can be used in lifesaving transplantation treatments to create a healthy hematopoietic system in patients suffering from malignant or inherited blood diseases. However, lack of matching bone marrow donors, and the low quantity of HSCs in a single cord blood graft, are limitations for successful transplantation. The enormous regenerative potential of HSCs has raised the hope that HSC self-renewal could be recapitulated in culture to achieve robust expansion of HSCs for therapeutic use. Yet, when HSCs are cultured ex vivo their function becomes compromised, limiting successful expansion. Recent Findings: After decades of efforts to expand human HSCs ex vivo that resulted in minimal increase in transplantable units, recent studies have helped define culture conditions that can increase functional HSCs. These studies have provided new insights into how HSC stemness can be controlled from the nucleus by transcriptional, posttranscriptional and epigenetic regulators, or by improving the HSC microenvironment using 3D scaffolds, niche cells, or signaling molecules that mimic specific aspects of human HSC niche. Recent studies have also highlighted the importance of mitigating culture induced cellular stress and balancing mitochondrial, endoplasmic reticulum, and lysosomal functions. These discoveries have provided better markers for functional human HSCs and new insights into how HSC self-renewal and engraftment ability may be controlled ex vivo. Summary: Uncovering the mechanisms that control the human HSC self-renewal process may help improve the ex vivo expansion of HSCs for clinical purposes

Ectodysplasin has a dual role in ectodermal organogenesis: inhibition of Bmp activity and induction of Shh expression.

Ectodermal organogenesis is regulated by inductive and reciprocal signalling cascades that involve multiple signal molecules in several conserved families. Ectodysplasin-A (Eda), a tumour necrosis factor-like signalling molecule, and its receptor Edar are required for the development of a number of ectodermal organs in vertebrates. In mice, lack of Eda leads to failure in primary hair placode formation and missing or abnormally shaped teeth, whereas mice overexpressing Eda are characterized by enlarged hair placodes and supernumerary teeth and mammary glands. Here, we report two signalling outcomes of the Eda pathway: suppression of bone morphogenetic protein (Bmp) activity and upregulation of sonic hedgehog (Shh) signalling. Recombinant Eda counteracted Bmp4 activity in developing teeth and, importantly, inhibition of BMP activity by exogenous noggin partially restored primary hair placode formation in Eda-deficient skin in vitro, indicating that suppression of Bmp activity was compromised in the absence of Eda. The downstream effects of the Eda pathway are likely to be mediated by transcription factor nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-kappaB), but the transcriptional targets of Edar have remained unknown. Using a quantitative approach, we show in cultured embryonic skin that Eda induced the expression of two Bmp inhibitors, Ccn2/Ctgf (CCN family protein 2/connective tissue growth factor) and follistatin. Moreover, our data indicate that Shh is a likely transcriptional target of Edar, but, unlike noggin, recombinant Shh was unable to rescue primary hair placode formation in Eda-deficient skin explants

p63 regulates multiple signalling pathways required for ectodermal organogenesis and differentiation

Heterozygous germline mutations in p63, a transcription factor of the p53 family, result in abnormal morphogenesis of the skin and its associated structures, including hair follicles and teeth. In mice lacking p63, all ectodermal organs fail to develop, and stratification of the epidermis is absent. We show that the ectodermal placodes that mark early tooth and hair follicle morphogenesis do not form in p63-deficient embryos, although the multilayered dental lamina that precedes tooth placode formation develops normally. The N-terminally truncated isoform of p63 (?Np63) was expressed at high levels in embryonic ectoderm at all stages of tooth and hair development, and it was already dominant over the transactivating TAp63 isoform prior to epidermal stratification. Bmp7, Fgfr2b, Jag1 and Notch1 transcripts were co-expressed with ANp63 in wild-type embryos, but were not detectable in the ectoderm of p63 mutants. In addition, ?-catenin and Edar transcripts were significantly reduced in skin ectoderm. We also demonstrate that BMP2, BMP7 and FGF10 are potent inducers of p63 in cultured tissue explants. Hence, we suggest that p63 regulates the morphogenesis of surface ectoderm and its derivatives via multiple signalling pathways

Four-Body Effects in Globular Cluster Black Hole Coalescence

In the high density cores of globular clusters, multibody interactions are expected to be common, with the result that black holes in binaries are hardened by interactions. It was shown by Sigurdsson & Hernquist (1993) and others that 10 solar mass black holes interacting exclusively by three-body encounters do not merge in the clusters themselves, because recoil kicks the binaries out of the clusters before the binaries are tight enough to merge. Here we consider a new mechanism, involving four-body encounters. Numerical simulations by a number of authors suggest that roughly 20-50% of binary-binary encounters will eject one star but leave behind a stable hierarchical triple. If the orbital plane of the inner binary is strongly tilted with respect to the orbital plane of the outer object, a secular Kozai resonance, first investigated in the context of asteroids in the Solar System, can increase the eccentricity of the inner body significantly. We show that in a substantial fraction of cases the eccentricity is driven to a high enough value that the inner binary will merge by gravitational radiation, without a strong accompanying kick. Thus the merged object remains in the cluster; depending on the binary fraction of black holes and the inclination distribution of newly-formed hierarchical triples, this mechanism may allow massive black holes to accumulate through successive mergers in the cores of globular clusters. It may also increase the likelihood that stellar-mass black holes in globular clusters will be detectable by their gravitational radiation.Comment: Submitted to ApJ Letters (includes emulateapj.sty

Spin Evolution of Supermassive Black Holes and Galactic Nuclei

The spin angular momentum S of a supermassive black hole (SBH) precesses due to torques from orbiting stars, and the stellar orbits precess due to dragging of inertial frames by the spinning hole. We solve the coupled post-Newtonian equations describing the joint evolution of S and the stellar angular momenta Lj, j = 1...N in spherical, rotating nuclear star clusters. In the absence of gravitational interactions between the stars, two evolutionary modes are found: (1) nearly uniform precession of S about the total angular momentum vector of the system; (2) damped precession, leading, in less than one precessional period, to alignment of S with the angular momentum of the rotating cluster. Beyond a certain distance from the SBH, the time scale for angular momentum changes due to gravitational encounters between the stars is shorter than spin-orbit precession times. We present a model, based on the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck equation, for the stochastic evolution of star clusters due to gravitational encounters and use it to evaluate the evolution of S in nuclei where changes in the Lj are due to frame dragging close to the SBH and to encounters farther out. Long-term evolution in this case is well described as uniform precession of the SBH about the cluster's rotational axis, with an increasingly important stochastic contribution when SBH masses are small. Spin precessional periods are predicted to be strongly dependent on nuclear properties, but typical values are 10-100 Myr for low-mass SBHs in dense nuclei, 100 Myr - 10 Gyr for intermediate mass SBHs, and > 10 Gyr for the most massive SBHs. We compare the evolution of SBH spins in stellar nuclei to the case of torquing by an inclined, gaseous accretion disk.Comment: 25 page

Energy consumption in animal production : case farm study

v2012o

N-body Integrators with Individual Time Steps from Hierarchical Splitting

We review the implementation of individual particle time-stepping for N-body dynamics. We present a class of integrators derived from second order Hamiltonian splitting. In contrast to the usual implementation of individual time-stepping, these integrators are momentum conserving and show excellent energy conservation in conjunction with a symmetrized time step criterion. We use an explicit but approximate formula for the time symmetrization that is compatible with the use of individual time steps. No iterative scheme is necessary. We implement these ideas in the HUAYNO (available online at www.amusecode.org) code and present tests of the integrators and show that the presented integration schemes shows good energy conservation, with little or no systematic drift, while conserving momentum and angular momentum to machine precision for long term integrations.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in New Astronom