Influential Article Review - Investigating the Complements to Supervisory Leadership

This paper examines leadership. We present insights from a highly influential paper. Here are the highlights from this paper: Self-management is increasingly required by people in jobs with flexible schedules and locations, freelance arrangements, and other forms of organizational job design. Successful self-management requires a sense of engagement with one’s work. We build from the substitutes for leadership literature to develop a model of work design focused on how complements to supervisory leadership foster work engagement. The model illustrates a parsimonious set of possible complements to supervisory leadership: feedback from the work itself, technology support of work, knowledge to work independently, electronic communication with supervisors, and alternative workplace use as predictors of work engagement. Results are from a two-period field study of a Nordic telecom company experienced with flexible work practices. Additionally, in time 2, we compare the data from this first organization with a Nordic transportation company that is less experienced with flexible work practices. Our results show the strongest relationships with work engagement are feedback from the work itself and technology support of work. Supervisor electronic communication also plays a role in work engagement, mediated by alternative workplace use. We highlight shifts in work design that can enable more flexible work settings while maintaining worker engagement in our increasingly digital organizations. For our overseas readers, we then present the insights from this paper in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German

Entry Strategy for Radical Product Innovations: A Conceptual Model and Propositional Inventory

“Takeoff” is a prerequisite for new product success. The central concern of this paper is how firms can reduce “takeoff time” for radical innovations. We propose a set of entry strategies and examine their effectiveness in stimulating initial demand and accelerating time-to-takeoff by considering the moderating impact of technological, competitive and firm-specific factors. The intended contributions are: (1) to enrich the literature on entry strategy by developing a propositional framework from a strategy perspective; (2) to provide managerial guidelines for achieving more rapid takeoff; and (3) to suggest an agenda for research on takeoff strategies

The impact of self-interacting dark matter on the intrinsic alignments of galaxies

The formation and evolution of galaxies is known to be sensitive to tidal processes leading to intrinsic correlations between their shapes and orientations. Such correlations can be measured to high significance today, suggesting that cosmological information can be extracted from them. Among the most pressing questions in particle physics and cosmology is the nature of dark matter. If dark matter is self-interacting, it can leave an imprint on galaxy shapes. In this work, we investigate whether self-interactions can produce a long-lasting imprint on intrinsic galaxy shape correlations. We investigate this observable at low redshift (z < 0.4) using a state-of-the-art suite of cosmological hydro-dynamical simulations where the dark matter model is varied. We find that dark matter self-interactions induce a mass-dependent suppression in the intrinsic alignment signal by up to 50 per cent out to tens of mega-parsecs, showing that self-interactions can impact structure outside the very core of clusters. We find evidence that self-interactions have a scale-dependent impact on the intrinsic alignment signal that is sufficiently different from signatures introduced by differing baryonic physics prescriptions, suggesting that it is detectable with upcoming all-sky surveys

Packed Red Blood Cells Are an Abundant and Proximate Potential Source of Nitric Oxide Synthase Inhibition

<div><p>Objective</p><p>We determined, for packed red blood cells (PRBC) and fresh frozen plasma, the maximum content, and ability to release the endogenous nitric oxide synthase (NOS) inhibitors asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA) and monomethylarginine (LNMMA).</p><p>Background</p><p>ADMA and LNMMA are near equipotent NOS inhibitors forming blood’s total NOS inhibitory content. The balance between removal from, and addition to plasma determines their free concentrations. Removal from plasma is by well-characterized specific hydrolases while formation is restricted to posttranslational protein methylation. When released into plasma they can readily enter endothelial cells and inhibit NOS. Fresh rat and human whole blood contain substantial protein incorporated ADMA however; the maximum content of ADMA and LNMMA in PRBC and fresh frozen plasma has not been determined.</p><p>Methods</p><p>We measured total (free and protein incorporated) ADMA and LNMMA content in PRBCs and fresh frozen plasma, as well as their incubation induced release, using HPLC with fluorescence detection. We tested the hypothesis that PRBC and fresh frozen plasma contain substantial inhibitory methylarginines that can be released chemically by complete <i>in vitro</i> acid hydrolysis or physiologically at 37°C by enzymatic blood proteolysis.</p><p>Results</p><p><i>In vitro</i> strong-acid-hydrolysis revealed a large PRBC reservoir of ADMA (54.5 ± 9.7 µM) and LNMMA (58.9 ± 28.9 μM) that persisted over 42-d at 6° or -80°C. <i>In vitro</i> 5h incubation at 37°C nearly doubled free ADMA and LNMMNA concentration from PRBCs while no change was detected in fresh frozen plasma.</p><p>Conclusion</p><p>The compelling physiological ramifications are that regardless of storage age, 1) PRBCs can rapidly release pathologically relevant quantities of ADMA and LNMMA when incubated and 2) PRBCs have a protein-incorporated inhibitory methylarginines reservoir 100 times that of normal free inhibitory methylarginines in blood and thus could represent a clinically relevant and proximate risk for iatrogenic NOS inhibition upon transfusion.</p></div

Community owned solutions: identifying local best practices for social-ecological sustainability

Policies and actions that come from higher scale structures, such as international bodies and national governments, are not always compatible with the realities and perspectives of smaller scale units including indigenous communities. Yet, it is at this local social-ecological scale that mechanisms and solutions for dealing with unpredictability and change can be increasingly seen emerging from across the world. Although there is a large body of knowledge specifying the conditions necessary to promote local governance of natural resources, there is a parallel need to develop practical methods for operationalizing the evaluation of local social-ecological systems. In this paper, we report on a systemic, participatory, and visual approach for engaging local communities in an exploration of their own social-ecological system. Working with indigenous communities of the North Rupununi, Guyana, this involved using participatory video and photography within a system viability framework to enable local participants to analyze their own situation by defining indicators of successful strategies that were meaningful to them. Participatory multicriteria analysis was then used to arrive at a short list of best practice strategies. We present six best practices and show how they are intimately linked through the themes of indigenous knowledge, local governance and values, and partnerships and networks. We highlight how developing shared narratives of community owned solutions can help communities to plan governance and management of land and resource systems, while reinforcing sustainable practices by discussing and showcasing them within communities, and by engendering a sense of pride in local solutions

Kepler-424 b: A "lonely" hot Jupiter that found a companion

Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Learning from one another: evaluating the impact of horizontal knowledge exchange for environmental management and governance

There is increasing advocacy for inclusive community-based approaches to environmental management, and growing evidence that involving communities improves the sustainability of social-ecological systems. Most community-based approaches rely on partnerships and knowledge exchange between communities, civil society organizations, and professionals such as practitioners and/or scientists. However, few models have actively integrated more horizontal knowledge exchange from community to community. We reflect on the transferability of community owned solutions between indigenous communities by exploring challenges and achievements of community peer-to-peer knowledge exchange as a way of empowering communities to face up to local environmental and social challenges. Using participatory visual methods, indigenous communities of the North Rupununi (Guyana) identified and documented their community owned solutions through films and photostories. Indigenous researchers from this community then shared their solutions with six other communities that faced similar challenges within Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela, Colombia, French Guiana, and Brazil. They were supported by in-country civil society organizations and academics. We analyzed the impact of the knowledge exchange through interviews, field reports, and observations. Our results show that indigenous community members were significantly more receptive to solutions emerging from, and communicated by, other indigenous peoples, and that this approach was a significant motivating force for galvanizing communities to make changes in their community. We identified a range of enabling factors, such as building capacity for a shared conceptual and technical understanding, that strengthens the exchange between communities and contributes to a lasting impact. With national and international policy-makers mobilizing significant financial resources for biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation, we argue that the promotion of community owned solutions through community peer-to-peer exchange may deliver more long-lasting, socially and ecologically integrated, and investment-effective strategies compared to top-down, expert led, and/or foreign-led initiatives

Masses, radii, and orbits of small Kepler planets : The transition from gaseous to rocky planets

We report on the masses, sizes, and orbits of the planets orbiting 22 Kepler stars. There are 49 planet candidates around these stars, including 42 detected through transits and 7 revealed by precise Doppler measurements of the host stars. Based on an analysis of the Kepler brightness measurements, along with high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy, Doppler spectroscopy, and (for 11 stars) asteroseismology, we establish low false-positive probabilities (FPPs) for all of the transiting planets (41 of 42 have an FPP under 1%), and we constrain their sizes and masses. Most of the transiting planets are smaller than three times the size of Earth. For 16 planets, the Doppler signal was securely detected, providing a direct measurement of the planet's mass. For the other 26 planets we provide either marginal mass measurements or upper limits to their masses and densities; in many cases we can rule out a rocky composition. We identify six planets with densities above 5 g cm-3, suggesting a mostly rocky interior for them. Indeed, the only planets that are compatible with a purely rocky composition are smaller than 2 R ⊕. Larger planets evidently contain a larger fraction of low-density material (H, He, and H2O).Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Regulation of SNAIL1 and E-cadherin function by DNMT1 in a DNA methylation-independent context

Mammalian DNA methyltransferase 1 (DNMT1) is essential for maintaining DNA methylation patterns after cell division. Disruption of DNMT1 catalytic activity results in whole genome cytosine demethylation of CpG dinucleotides, promoting severe dysfunctions in somatic cells and during embryonic development. While these observations indicate that DNMT1-dependent DNA methylation is required for proper cell function, the possibility that DNMT1 has a role independent of its catalytic activity is a matter of controversy. Here, we provide evidence that DNMT1 can support cell functions that do not require the C-terminal catalytic domain. We report that PCNA and DMAP1 domains in the N-terminal region of DNMT1 are sufficient to modulate E-cadherin expression in the absence of noticeable changes in DNA methylation patterns in the gene promoters involved. Changes in E-cadherin expression are directly associated with regulation of β-catenin-dependent transcription. Present evidence suggests that the DNMT1 acts on E-cadherin expression through its direct interaction with the E-cadherin transcriptional repressor SNAIL1