Linking personality to cultural intelligence : an interactive effect of openness and agreeableness

The personality trait of openness is generally believed to influence an individual's cultural intelligence, which is an ability to deal effectively with people from different cultural backgrounds. This study examines whether a relationship between the two depends on the individual's degree of agreeableness, a personality trait important for building interpersonal relationships. Data collected from 244 international professionals shows that openness is positively related to three facets of cultural intelligence when agreeableness is high, but not when agreeableness is low. The findings suggest that research on personality and cultural intelligence would benefit from an interactive approach, and that assessment, selection and development of international talents should consider personality traits not in isolation, but in concert

Municipal Property Acquisition Patterns in a Shrinking City: Evidence for the Persistence of an Urban Growth Paradigm in Buffalo, NY

The purpose of this article is to examine municipal property acquisition patterns in shrinking cities. We use data from the City of Buffalo’s municipal property auction records to analyze the spatial distribution of properties offered for sale in its annual tax foreclosure auction. In addition to these data, we examine demolition and building permit records. Our analysis suggests that cities like Buffalo follow strategies based on an urban growth paradigm when responding to abandonment. This paradigm operates under the assumption that growth is a constant and urban development is only limited by fiscal constraints, underdeveloped systems of urban governance, environmental degradation, and resistance by anti-growth coalitions. We recommend that planners in shrinking cities de-emphasize growth based planning and focus on rightsizing strategies. These strategies are based on the assumption that growth is not a constant. Consequently, urban revitalization is concentrated in a smaller urban footprint

Recommendations for the Curbing of Corruption, Cronyism, Nepotism, & Fraud in the European Commission

The European Commission consists of twenty appointed members including a Commission President, and serves primarily as a policy initiator and administrator for the European Union. Allegations of corruption had long surrounded the Commission and, through a series of events, an independent panel of experts was charged with the duty of investigating specific allegations of corruption. On March 16, 1999, the independent panel issued a scathing report of a sad catalog of negligence and mismanagement by the Commissioners. This report not only identified individual instances of mismanagement, cronyism, nepotism, and fraud but also excoriated the Commission for lacking even the slightest sense of responsibility. As a result, in an unprecedented and sensational move, the entire Commission resigned immediately. The European Commission\u27s inherent structure may encourage governmental abuses, inefficiency, and corruption, and the author discusses the deficiencies of this structure. In light of these deficiencies, the author reviews a variety of recommendations posited by the panel of independent experts and other critics for increasing accountability and preventing corruption. Of these, she concludes that the creation of an Independent Prosecutor\u27s Office would be pivotal in the curbing of corruption by increasing the efficiency and accountability of the Commission

Anti-social behavior detection in audio-visual surveillance systems

In this paper we propose a general purpose framework for detection of unusual events. The proposed system is based on the unsupervised method for unusual scene detection in web{cam images that was introduced in [1]. We extend their algorithm to accommodate data from different modalities and introduce the concept of time-space blocks. In addition, we evaluate early and late fusion techniques for our audio-visual data features. The experimental results on 192 hours of data show that data fusion of audio and video outperforms using a single modality