Do Support Groups Mitigate the Effects of Imposter Syndrome?

Imposter syndrome is defined as the persistent inability to believe that one\u27s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one\u27s own efforts or skills. Small support groups utilized in an academic environment could prove to be effective in mitigating the effects of imposter syndrome. A total of 4 articles were individually reviewed and included for meta-analysis. Each study was conducted on students studying medicine and utilized support groups at the core of their intervention for combating imposter syndrome and improving overall psychological wellness. Results were based on surveys and yielded an overall positive response from participants. While these results were subjective in nature, the diagnosis of imposter syndrome is subjective as well, leading to the conclusion that support groups do have an impact on the effects of imposter syndrome. However, further studies should be conducted in order to reach more definitive conclusions on the details necessary for optimal support group implementation

A practical method of measuring the human temporal contrast sensitivity function

One of the more significant indicators of neural age-related loss and disease is reduced temporal processing speed. It would, therefore, be useful to have an accurate and practical device that measures the full range of an individual's temporal processing abilities (characterized as the temporal contrast sensitivity function, TCSF). 70 subjects (15-84 yrs) were tested. A small tabletop device utilizing electronic control of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) was constructed that delivered a 1-degree, 660 nm test (the modulation depth of which could be adjusted directly by the subject) centered within a 10-degree 660 nm surround. The method provided a TCSF that had a shape consistent with past studies (peaking around 8 Hz). Also consistent with past work, the largest age-decline was found at the highest frequencies and for the central fovea (r = 0.47, p<0.0001, ~2 Hz per decade). Psychophysical assessment of temporal vision offers an easy and dynamic measure of central visual function

TSP With Locational Uncertainty: The Adversarial Model

In this paper we study a natural special case of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) with point-locational-uncertainty which we will call the adversarial TSP problem (ATSP). Given a metric space (X, d) and a set of subsets R = {R_1, R_2, ...R_n} : R_i subseteq X, the goal is to devise an ordering of the regions, sigma_R, that the tour will visit such that when a single point is chosen from each region, the induced tour over those points in the ordering prescribed by sigma_R is as short as possible. Unlike the classical locational-uncertainty-TSP problem, which focuses on minimizing the expected length of such a tour when the point within each region is chosen according to some probability distribution, here, we focus on the adversarial model in which once the choice of sigma_R is announced, an adversary selects a point from each region in order to make the resulting tour as long as possible. In other words, we consider an offline problem in which the goal is to determine an ordering of the regions R that is optimal with respect to the ``worst\u27\u27 point possible within each region being chosen by an adversary, who knows the chosen ordering. We give a 3-approximation when R is a set of arbitrary regions/sets of points in a metric space. We show how geometry leads to improved constant factor approximations when regions are parallel line segments of the same lengths, and a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for the important special case in which R is a set of disjoint unit disks in the plane

Probing a Set of Trajectories to Maximize Captured Information

We study a trajectory analysis problem we call the Trajectory Capture Problem (TCP), in which, for a given input set T of trajectories in the plane, and an integer k? 2, we seek to compute a set of k points ("portals") to maximize the total weight of all subtrajectories of T between pairs of portals. This problem naturally arises in trajectory analysis and summarization. We show that the TCP is NP-hard (even in very special cases) and give some first approximation results. Our main focus is on attacking the TCP with practical algorithm-engineering approaches, including integer linear programming (to solve instances to provable optimality) and local search methods. We study the integrality gap arising from such approaches. We analyze our methods on different classes of data, including benchmark instances that we generate. Our goal is to understand the best performing heuristics, based on both solution time and solution quality. We demonstrate that we are able to compute provably optimal solutions for real-world instances

Can a leader be seen as too ethical? The curvilinear effects of ethical leadership

Ethical leadership predicts important organizational outcomes such as decreased deviant and increased organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). We argued that due to the distinct nature of these two types of employee behaviors, ethical leadership decreases deviance in a linear manner (i.e., more ethical leadership leading to less deviance), but we expected ethical leadership to reveal a curvilinear relationship with respect to OCB. Specifically, we expected that, at lower levels, ethical leadership promotes OCB. However, at high levels, ethical leadership should lead to a decrease in these behaviors. We also examined a mechanism that explains this curvilinear pattern, that is, followers’ perceptions of moral reproach. Our predictions were supported in three organizational field studies and an experiment. These findings offer a better understanding of the processes that underlie the workings of ethical leadership. They also imply a dilemma for organizations in which they face the choice between limiting deviant employee behavior and promoting OCB

Network Optimization on Partitioned Pairs of Points

Given n pairs of points, S = {{p_1, q_1}, {p_2, q_2}, ..., {p_n, q_n}}, in some metric space, we study the problem of two-coloring the points within each pair, red and blue, to optimize the cost of a pair of node-disjoint networks, one over the red points and one over the blue points. In this paper we consider our network structures to be spanning trees, traveling salesman tours or matchings. We consider several different weight functions computed over the network structures induced, as well as several different objective functions. We show that some of these problems are NP-hard, and provide constant factor approximation algorithms in all cases