From Fraudsters to Scammers and Cyber-Villains, Tech-Savvy Criminals Are Out to Steal Your Money

Today, more than ever before, criminals are out to steal from your business. However, today, criminals not only use organized shoplifting gangs and engage in armed robberies, but they now also use computers and the internet. Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried have joined the lengthy list of well-known criminals before Charles Ponzi. The Fraud Triangle (Cressey, 1973) is based upon Opportunity, Incentive, and Rationalization. The COVID-19 pandemic created a perfect storm of opportunity for would-be scammers. The federal government fueled opportunity with $800 billion in COVID relief funding for the Paycheck Protection Program and up to$400 billion for COVID unemployment relief. According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) small businesses are often targeted as they tend to have fewer safeguards in place to prevent fraud. The ACFE reports that the average loss for a small business fraud is $100,000 and an average of five percent of annual revenue. In this paper, the authors provide an overview of current fraud activities and a study of the Traits of Sympathy survey to help examine whether a relationship exists between one’s rationalization and sympathy in their decision to commit fraud in the pre-fraud state. We present research findings and offer recommendations

In Search of Humble Leaders

The significance of moderation and balance across various domains has been sanctioned for millennia and deviations from midpoints of virtues, traits, qualities, and other attributes have been described as dysfunctional suggesting a nonmonotonic, U-shaped curve. Modern scholarship and lay interpretations of the virtue of humility have neglected this perspective and appear to tacitly assume that humility is an unmitigated good that leaders should develop and that more is better. Here we show, however, that what we refer to as authentic humility, is positioned at an intermediate point between negative and positive views of the self and that deviations from this center adversely impact well-being and offer a nonlinear, inverted U-shaped curve. Such an interpretation reconciles views of humility as a weakness or strength and demonstrates its positive impact on self, followers, and organizational well-being. We conclude by suggesting that humility has costs for leaders and therefore not an unmitigated good.&nbsp

Sweat the Small Stuff, How Small Incidents of Negative Workplace Behavior Lead to Larger Misconduct

Small losses, measurable incremental negative workplace behaviors that do not align with organizational and societal norms often trigger a dynamic, magnifying process that produces greater undesirable outcomes, which once started, can often result in a downward spiral. Quickly addressing small problems can prevent minor misconduct and wrongdoing from escalating into greater difficulties later that can appear unstoppable. Failure to tackle the small issues and big problems will often follow. Managers should celebrate small victories or wins but also need to address small losses. Just as small wins can result in significant organizational gains, small losses can result in business losses

How managers use the Stockdale Paradox to balance “the now and the next”

Recent discussions of leadership paradoxes have suggested that managers who can hold seemingly opposed, yet interrelated perspectives, are more adaptive and effective. One such paradox that has received relatively little attention is the “Stockdale Paradox,” named after Admiral James Stockdale, an American naval officer who was held captive for seven and one-half years during the Vietnam War and survived imprisonment in large part because he held beliefs of optimism about the future, while simultaneously acknowledging the current reality of the desperate situation in which he found himself. This contradictory tension enabled him and his followers to emerge from their situation not just unbroken, but stronger. Such paradoxical thinking has been empirically supported by mental contrasting research demonstrating the effectiveness of visualizing a positive future yet recognizing the reality of the current situation. This apparent dichotomy provides an important lesson for leaders who must remain optimistic, yet face the reality of their present condition, and is symbolic of an overarching, general tension leaders face in addressing “the now and the next.

Never Underestimate the Power of a Backhoe: Integrating Single Points of Failure into Strategic Planning

SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis is probably used more often than any other management technique in strategic decision making. There appears to be a greater emphasis, however, on identifying strengths and opportunities while weaknesses and threats are examined less closely. Such bias may be problematic because firms may overlook single points of failure (SPOFs), which are elements that, upon malfunction, render an entire system unavailable or unreliable. These threats and weaknesses are most often presented in information technology and engineering discussions of equipment, machine, and device breakdowns, but may have applicability in a number of other areas important to organizations including people; materials and supplies; methods and processes; and shock events—natural and human-made disasters. To be resilient in today’s 24-7, 365 days a year global business world, it is critical that organizations effectively anticipate, evaluate, prepare for, and mitigate SPOF risks that can have a seriously negative impact on a firm’s performance. The paper concludes with a three-step approach to help managers reduce and effectively respond to SPOFs. Companies that integrate the concept of SPOFs into their strategic planning could develop high-impact management skill, leading to improved corporate profitability

Women’s Empowerment Campaigns: Helpful or Harmful to the Workplace?

Women’s empowerment campaigns create greater equality for women in numerous areas including social, political, economic, and occupational fields. However, the current #MeToo and Time’s Up movements have become increasingly hostile toward men. This hostility has developed an anti-male environment that may be perceived by men as unfair restrictions on their behavior and boundaries on their autonomy. This leads to adoption of behavior and attitudes opposite of the intended effects and that may do more harm than good. This response is explained as psychological reactance. The authors discuss its harmful impact in the workplace offer suggestions for mitigating these situations

Cueing the Customer Using Nudges and Negative Option Marketing

Abstract Nudges—subtle, covert, and often unobtrusive interventions that take advantage of individuals’ mental shortcuts and biases—frequently change the context of people’s choices and in so doing influence individual and societal behavior. They have become fashionable in recent years, and the ability of such phenomena to bring about significant change for relatively little cost has captured the imagination of governments and businesses. One simple yet potent nudge empowered by the status-quo bias that has received increased attention involves default rules which specify the condition imposed on persons when they fail to make a decision or choice. Marketers have used default options successfully for decades within the context of negative option marketing where sellers interpret consumers’ silence or inaction as permission to continue charging them for goods or services. Despite their attractiveness, nudges, defaults, and negative option marketing are controversial issues that require further examination which the authors present in this paper. Keywords: cueing, nudges, negative option marketing, default

Global prevalence of age-related macular degeneration and disease burden projection for 2020 and 2040: A systematic review and meta-analysis

10.1016/S2214-109X(13)70145-1The Lancet Global Health22e106-e11

The Fano normal function

The Fano surface $F$ of lines in the cubic threefold $V$ is naturally embedded in the intermediate Jacobian $J(V)$, we call "Fano cycle" the difference $F-F^-$, this is homologous to 0 in $J(V)$. We study the normal function on the moduli space which computes the Abel-Jacobi image of the Fano cycle. By means of the related infinitesimal invariant we can prove that the primitive part of the normal function is not of torsion. As a consequence we get that, for a general $V$, $F-F^-$ in not algebraically equivalent to zero in $J(V)$ (already proved by van der Geer-Kouvidakis) and, moreover, there is no a divisor in $JV$ containing both $F$ and $F^-$ and such that these surfaces are homologically equivalent in the divisor. Our study of the infinitesimal variation of Hodge structure for $V$ produces intrinsically a threefold $\Xi (V)$ in $\mathbb G$ the Grasmannian of lines in $\mathbb P^4.$ We show that the infinitesimal invariant at $V$ attached to the normal function gives a section for a natural bundle on $\Xi(V)$ and more specifically that this section vanishes exactly on $\Xi\cap F,$ which turns out to be the curve in $F$ parameterizing the "double lines" in the threefold. We prove that this curve reconstructs $V$ and hence we get a Torelli-like result: the infinitesimal invariant for the Fano cycle determines $V$.Comment: Final form. Accepted in the Journal de Math\'ematiques Pures et Appliqu\'ee

A self-referenced in-situ arrival time monitor for X-ray free-electron lasers

We present a novel, highly versatile, and self-referenced arrival time monitor for measuring the femtosecond time delay between a hard X-ray pulse from a free-electron laser and an optical laser pulse, measured directly on the same sample used for pump-probe experiments. Two chirped and picosecond long optical supercontinuum pulses traverse the sample with a mutually fixed time delay of 970 fs, while a femtosecond X-ray pulse arrives at an instant in between both pulses. Behind the sample the supercontinuum pulses are temporally overlapped to yield near-perfect destructive interference in the absence of the X-ray pulse. Stimulation of the sample with an X-ray pulse delivers non-zero contributions at certain optical wavelengths, which serve as a measure of the relative arrival time of the X-ray pulse with an accuracy of better than 25 fs. We find an excellent agreement of our monitor with the existing timing diagnostics at the SACLA XFEL with a Pearson correlation value of 0.98. We demonstrate a high sensitivity to measure X-ray pulses with pulse energies as low as 30 $\mu$J. Using a free-flowing liquid jet as interaction sample ensures the full replacement of the sample volume for each X-ray/optical event, thus enabling its utility even at MHz repetition rate XFEL sources