Leonid flashers—meteoroid impacts on the Moon

We examine the conditions under which optical impact flashes might be observable on the Moon’s disk during the times of annual meteor shower activity. Our attention is primarily directed towards the Leonid shower given the high probability that it will undergo repeated outburst activity during the next several years. The Leonid stream to Moon encounter geometry is discussed, and we find that the best probable times to perform optical surveys will be in 1999 and 2002. We estimate that a one kilogram Leonid meteoroid might produce a magnitude-2 optical transient on the Moon’s disk

Morphology of suprascapular notch in medieval skeletons from Bulgaria

The suprascapular notch is situated in the lateral part of the superior border of the scapula, just medial to the base of the coracoid process, giving passage for the suprascapular nerve. The aim of this study is to determine the frequency of different types of suprascapular notch in male and female medieval skeletal series and to assess the sexual differences. The shape of the notch was classified into 5 types, based on the scheme given by Alekseev. A total of 102 scapulae and scapular fragments were investigated. The results show that the deep notch was the most common. In the left female scapulae the shallow notch was frequently observed as well. Three cases of suprascapular foramen, which is considered as a risk factor for suprascapular nerve neuropathy, were observed and there was a double foramen in one of them, which is a very rare case. According to the results of c2 test, there were no significant sexual differences in the distribution of notch types. Our results illustrate that there were some individuals among the investigated medieval population potentially affected by suprascapular nerve entrapment syndrome and their way of livingmay have been impacted by the symptoms accompanying this condition

Determinants of Self-Employment in the United States

The prominence entrepreneurs have occupied in the popular imagination belies their relative neglect in formal economic theory. This paper adds to the growing body of work on entrepreneurs by examining the characteristics of self-employed individuals in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. We believe our article to be the first that uses this fresh body of data for this purpose. Employing the standard binomial probit model with a list of potentially significant variables drawn from existing literature, we discovered that women are significantly less likely to be self-employed than men

Professional identity and anxiety in architect-client interactions

© 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Large-scale construction projects increasingly have powerful and knowledgeable clients as project owners with whom professionals, such as architects, must interact. In such contexts, clients may have a significant impact on the constitution of a coherent and stable professional identity. Based on qualitative interviews with 50 architects across four large multidisciplinary professional service firms (PSFs) located in Sydney, Australia, supplemented by ethnographic observations, this article explores how architects constitute their identity in interactions with clients. The findings led us to conceptualise professional–client interactions in terms of two overarching discursive strategies deployed by architects in attempts to manage clients that are powerful and knowledgeable: best for client and best for project. We illustrate the anxieties that architects experience and suggest that attempts to secure professional identity may result in (re)producing an enduring sense of anxiety with unintended consequences for project outcomes and organisational performance

Stability of minimizers of regularized least squares objective functions i: study of the local behaviour, tech

Abstract. Many estimation problems amount to minimizing an objective function composed of a quadratic data-fidelity term and a general regularization term. It is widely accepted that the minimizers obtained using nonsmooth and/or nonconvex regularization terms are frequently good estimates. However, very few facts are known on the ways to control properties of these minimizers. This work is dedicated to the stability of the minimizers of such nonsmooth and/or nonconvex objective functions. It consists of two parts: in this part, we focus on general local minimizers, whereas in a second part, we derive results on global minimizers. Here we demonstrate that the data domain contains an open, dense subset whose elements give rise to local and global minimizers which are necessarily strict. Moreover, we show that the relevant minimizers are stable under variations of the data

Alpha managers - an advantage or disadvantage for the organization

The role of the manager is crucial to the organization. Managers set goals, develop strategies and define tasks of workers, create environment for the development of people and give meaning to their activities. Professional skills are of vital importance to manager’s success. These very skills are the distinguishing characteristics of alpha managers. The aim of the following paper is to present some of the most established ideas in the field of leadership styles, to compare them with the concept of alpha managers and draw some conclusions important to management

The outsourcing debate: Theories and findings

This paper addresses the issue of services outsourcing by looking at both theoretical and empirical arguments. Previous debates have often concentrated on the motives for adopting the practice rather than the outcomes. These various themes can be discussed under the twin concepts of the cost and efficiency argument and the fashion and isomorphism approach. Our research provides strong evidence to support the cost efficiency argument. On average, significant cost advantages were sought and delivered, as well as improvements in service levels and systems. Many organisations in the current environment in Australia look at outsourcing not only as a method of increasing efficiency but also as gaining competitive advantage through harnessing the superior specialist skills and experience of the outsourcing provider who takes someone's back office function and transforms them into their front office. A 10% net cost saving was considered necessary by an organisation before embarking on an organisational change that was disruptive and in some cases involved downside risks. Even if other efficiency gains such as service levels or systems improvements were required, so were 10%+ cost savings. A number of the organisations thought their skills in managing outsourcing had improved considerably such that they were in a position to move from a client/server relationship to a partnership model (i.e. an alliance)

The happiness gap in Eastern Europe

Citizens in Eastern Europe are less satisfied with life than their peers in other countries. This happiness gap has persisted over time, despite predictions to the contrary by earlier scholars. It holds after controlling for a variety of covariates, such as the standard of living, life expectancy and Eastern Orthodox religion. Armed with a battery of surveys from the early 1990s to 2014, we argue that the happiness gap is explained by how citizens in post-communist countries perceive their governments. Eastern Europeans link their life satisfaction to higher perceived corruption and weaker government performance. Our results suggest that the transition from central planning is still incomplete, at least in the psychology of people