Appointing Women to Boards: Is There a Cultural Bias?

Companies that are serious about corporate governance and business ethics are turning their attention to gender diversity at the most senior levels of business (Institute of Business Ethics, Business Ethics Briefing 21:1, 2011). Board gender diversity has been the subject of several studies carried out by international organizations such as Catalyst (Increasing gender diversity on boards: Current index of formal approaches, 2012), the World Economic Forum (Hausmann et al., The global gender gap report, 2010), and the European Board Diversity Analysis (Is it getting easier to find women on European boards? 2010). They all lead to reports confirming the overall relatively low proportion of women on boards and the slow pace at which more women are being appointed. Furthermore, the proportion of women on corporate boards varies much across countries. Based on institutional theory, this study hypothesizes and tests whether this variation can be attributed to differences in cultural settings across countries. Our analysis of the representation of women on boards for 32 countries during 2010 reveals that two cultural characteristics are indeed associated with the observed differences. We use the cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede (Culture’s consequences: International differences in work-related values, 1980) to measure this construct. Results show that countries which have the greatest tolerance for inequalities in the distribution of power and those that tend to value the role of men generally exhibit lower representations of women on boards

Gravitational Wave Detection by Interferometry (Ground and Space)

Significant progress has been made in recent years on the development of gravitational wave detectors. Sources such as coalescing compact binary systems, neutron stars in low-mass X-ray binaries, stellar collapses and pulsars are all possible candidates for detection. The most promising design of gravitational wave detector uses test masses a long distance apart and freely suspended as pendulums on Earth or in drag-free craft in space. The main theme of this review is a discussion of the mechanical and optical principles used in the various long baseline systems in operation around the world - LIGO (USA), Virgo (Italy/France), TAMA300 and LCGT (Japan), and GEO600 (Germany/U.K.) - and in LISA, a proposed space-borne interferometer. A review of recent science runs from the current generation of ground-based detectors will be discussed, in addition to highlighting the astrophysical results gained thus far. Looking to the future, the major upgrades to LIGO (Advanced LIGO), Virgo (Advanced Virgo), LCGT and GEO600 (GEO-HF) will be completed over the coming years, which will create a network of detectors with significantly improved sensitivity required to detect gravitational waves. Beyond this, the concept and design of possible future "third generation" gravitational wave detectors, such as the Einstein Telescope (ET), will be discussed.Comment: Published in Living Reviews in Relativit

The DREAM Dataset: Supporting a data-driven study of autism spectrum disorder and robot enhanced therapy

We present a dataset of behavioral data recorded from 61 children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The data was collected during a large-scale evaluation of Robot Enhanced Therapy (RET). The dataset covers over 3000 therapy sessions and more than 300 hours of therapy. Half of the children interacted with the social robot NAO supervised by a therapist. The other half, constituting a control group, interacted directly with a therapist. Both groups followed the Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) protocol. Each session was recorded with three RGB cameras and two RGBD (Kinect) cameras, providing detailed information of children’s behavior during therapy. This public release of the dataset comprises body motion, head position and orientation, and eye gaze variables, all specified as 3D data in a joint frame of reference. In addition, metadata including participant age, gender, and autism diagnosis (ADOS) variables are included. We release this data with the hope of supporting further data-driven studies towards improved therapy methods as well as a better understanding of ASD in general.CC BY 4.0DREAM - Development of robot-enhanced therapy for children with autism spectrum disorders

Retroviral transfer of donor MHC class I or MHC class II genes into recipient bone marrow cells can induce operational tolerance to alloantigens in vivo.

Infusion of allogeneic, donor bone marrow (BM) can induce specific immunological unresponsiveness in vivo resulting in long-term acceptance of subsequent fully allogeneic, donor-type solid organ grafts, but this may be associated with graft-versus-host disease. We hypothesize that transfer of donor MHC gene(s) to recipient-type BM or hematopoietic stem cells would enable delivery of donor alloantigens to the recipient without the risk of graft-versus-host disease. This strategy could also potentially take advantage of linked suppression to induce specific unresponsiveness to additional alloantigens expressed by the solid organ graft. We found that infusion of 5 x 10(6) CBA (H-2(k)) recipient mouse BM cells transduced with a recombinant replication-defective retrovirus encoding either a single donor MHC class I or class II gene (H-2K(b) or H-2IA(b)) in combination with anti-CD4 monoclonal antibody resulted in long-term survival of C57BL/10 (H-2(b)) but not third-party NZW (H-2(z)) heart grafts. BM cells (3 x 10(3)) enriched for hematopoietic stem cells by sorting for c-Kit(+), lineage-negative cells, were able to induce long-term allograft survival in 50% of recipients after transduction with the vector encoding a single donor MHC class I gene. These results have important implications for future strategies to enhance clinical allograft survival by delivery of donor alloantigens