Finance Training and Team Building: An Example of Finance Training Leading to Team Building

This research describes and evaluates how a finance training exercise led to readily identifiable team building among the participants in an executive development workshop initially targeted as a “Finance for the Non-Financial Executive “program. The finance exercise required the participants to make financial/operational tradeoffs in their own section of the firm in order to improve the return on assets for the corporation at large. The finance training workshop is used as a case study to provide observed behavioral inputs to evaluate and confirm that the finance training led to the team building. In order to confirm the emergence of team building, a collection of 12 published articles and texts on the subject of team building were reviewed and a master table was compiled containing all the authors’ named team characteristics. The workshop participant groups were observed and their individual and group behavior was compared to the team characteristics listed in the table. Their behavior matched all but two of the team characteristics listed in the lengthy table. Our conclusion was that the participant groups had, indeed, formed themselves into effective teams to accomplish their task of evaluating the financial/operational tradeoffs required to improve the return on assets for their firm. Their finance training led to team building

Inheritance through the cytoplasm

Most heritable information in eukaryotic cells is encoded in the nuclear genome, with inheritance patterns following classic Mendelian segregation. Genomes residing in the cytoplasm, however, prove to be a peculiar exception to this rule. Cytoplasmic genetic elements are generally maternally inherited, although there are several exceptions where these are paternally, biparentally or doubly-uniparentally inherited. In this review, we examine the diversity and peculiarities of cytoplasmically inherited genomes, and the broad evolutionary consequences that non-Mendelian inheritance brings. We first explore the origins of vertical transmission and uniparental inheritance, before detailing the vast diversity of cytoplasmic inheritance systems across Eukaryota. We then describe the evolution of genomic organisation across lineages, how this process has been shaped by interactions with the nuclear genome and population genetics dynamics. Finally, we discuss how both nuclear and cytoplasmic genomes have evolved to co-inhabit the same host cell via one of the longest symbiotic processes, and all the opportunities for intergenomic conflict that arise due to divergence in inheritance patterns. In sum, we cannot understand the evolution of eukaryotes without understanding hereditary symbiosis

The Interrelationships Between Organizational Communication, Organizational Climate, and Job Satisfaction in a Local Government Agency.

The interrelationships between three multivariate concepts: Organizational communication, organizational climate, and job satisfaction were studied in a local government agency. Demographic data were also studied as they, as a group, related to the three multivariate concepts. Questionnaires were collected from 175 of the 220 employees. Canonical analysis was utilized to analyze the respondents\u27 perceptions of the three concepts and to determine their relationships to the demographic data set. Organizational climate significantly correlated (p \u3c 0.001) with job satisfaction. Only very small, but significant (p \u3c 0.01) redundancy was found between the two concepts. Organizational communication and organizational climate were significantly correlated (p \u3c 0.001). Redundancy analysis indicated that small to moderate redundancies are shared between the concepts for the sample under study. Organizational communication and job satisfaction also exhibited significant correlation (p \u3c 0.001). Redundancy analysis indicated that communication explains a small but significant (p \u3c 0.05) amount of the variance in job satisfaction. However, job satisfaction did not not explain a significant amount of the variance in the communication variable set. For each of the canonical analyses studied, some of the values of the loadings on the components possessed positive signs while others possessed negative signs. Thus, the direction of the relationships between the three concepts remains unclear. Canonical analysis of demographic data and each of the three multivariate concepts was undertaken to determine whether the demographic makeup of the sample was affecting the relationships between the concepts. No significant relationship was found between demographics and organizational climate at the p \u3c 0.05 level. Canonical correlations between the demographic data set and the communication data set were significant beyond p \u3c 0.01. Redundancy analysis indicated that demographics did not explain a significant amount of the variance in communication (p \u3c 0.05). The reverse relationship was significant at p \u3c 0.01, thus clouding the question of the importance of demographics in explaining variance in the communication set. Canonical analysis of the demographic/satisfaction relationship was also significant (p \u3c 0.01). Redundancies yielded similar mixed findings as in the demographics/communication relationship. Conclusions from the analysis were drawn. Limitations to the usefulness of the findings were discussed. Finally, suggestions for further research were made

Best Reference 2017

It’s been a robust year for reference, as reflected in our best of list. While you’ll find tried-and-true reference, such as the most recent edition of Oxford Atlas of the World, we also attempted to surface the unusual—it’s not every year we see an Atlas of Beer! Though it was a particularly good year for history texts (with books on the Renaissance, the Holocaust, and the Vietnam War), we are particularly excited about the offerings that explored subjects that have gone unacknowledged, such as the Encyclopedia of Black Comics and Unseen: Unpublished Black History from the New York Times Photo Archive. Speaking of photos, many of these books are just as visually stunning as they are informative, such as Endangered, Natural Wonders of the World, and Thomas Schiff’s lush and lovely The Library Book. Finally, be sure to check out our roundup of the top databases of 2017 and the best free resources, which include amazing apps, websites, and additions to works you already know and love

Electrophysiological findings in cortical blindness. Report of a case,

Spontaneous cerebral activity and visual evoked responses have been described in a patient with post-traumatic cortical blindness who was studied over a period of 4 weeks. The resting occipital pattern was extremely small in amplitude but composed of frequencies largely within the normal alpha range. No evidence of light-induced alpha blocking could be detected. Averaged evoked responses derived from leads placed over the occipital poles were abnormal, in that they were rudimentary and inconsistent, none of the normal initial 5 waves being identifiable with certainty. The presence of a light-evoked, prominent vertex wave, dissimilar from that evoked by sound, was noteworthy in view of the virtual absence of an occipital response and severity of visual deficit.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/33470/1/0000875.pd

pSONIC: Ploidy-aware Syntenic Orthologous Networks Identified via Collinearity

With the rapid rise in availability of high-quality genomes for closely related species, methods for orthology inference that incorporate synteny are increasingly useful. Polyploidy perturbs the 1:1 expected frequencies of orthologs between two species, complicating the identification of orthologs. Here we present a method of ortholog inference, Ploidy-aware Syntenic Orthologous Networks Identified via Collinearity (pSONIC). We demonstrate the utility of pSONIC using four species in the cotton tribe (Gossypieae), including one allopolyploid, and place between 75-90% of genes from each species into nearly 32,000 orthologous groups, 97% of which consist of at most singletons or tandemly duplicated genes -- 58.8% more than comparable methods that do not incorporate synteny. We show that 99% of singleton gene groups follow the expected tree topology, and that our ploidy-aware algorithm recovers 97.5% identical groups when compared to splitting the allopolyploid into its two respective subgenomes, treating each as separate “species”

Sustained meaning activation for polysemous but not homonymous words: Evidence from EEG

Theoretical linguistic accounts of lexical ambiguity distinguish between homonymy, where words that share a lexical form have unrelated meanings, and polysemy, where the meanings are related. The present study explored the psychological reality of this theoretical assumption by asking whether there is evidence that homonyms and polysemes are represented and processed differently in the brain. We investigated the time-course of meaning activation of different types of ambiguous words using EEG. Homonyms and polysemes were each further subdivided into two: unbalanced homonyms (e.g., ". coach") and balanced homonyms (e.g., ". match"); metaphorical polysemes (e.g., ". mouth") and metonymic polysemes (e.g., ". rabbit"). These four types of ambiguous words were presented as primes in a visual single-word priming delayed lexical decision task employing a long ISI (750. ms). Targets were related to one of the meanings of the primes, or were unrelated. ERPs formed relative to the target onset indicated that the theoretical distinction between homonymy and polysemy was reflected in the N400 brain response. For targets following homonymous primes (both unbalanced and balanced), no effects survived at this long ISI indicating that both meanings of the prime had already decayed. On the other hand, for polysemous primes (both metaphorical and metonymic), activation was observed for both dominant and subordinate senses. The observed processing differences between homonymy and polysemy provide evidence in support of differential neuro-cognitive representations for the two types of ambiguity. We argue that the polysemous senses act collaboratively to strengthen the representation, facilitating maintenance, while the competitive nature of homonymous meanings leads to decay

3D visualization of movements can amplify motor cortex activation during subsequent motor imagery

A repetitive movement practice by motor imagery (MI) can influence motor cortical excitability in the electroencephalogram (EEG). This study investigated if a realistic visualization in 3D of upper and lower limb movements can amplify motor related potentials during subsequent MI. We hypothesized that a richer sensory visualization might be more effective during instrumental conditioning, resulting in a more pronounced event related desynchronization (ERD) of the upper alpha band (10–12 Hz) over the sensorimotor cortices thereby potentially improving MI based brain-computer interface (BCI) protocols for motor rehabilitation. The results show a strong increase of the characteristic patterns of ERD of the upper alpha band components for left and right limb MI present over the sensorimotor areas in both visualization conditions. Overall, significant differences were observed as a function of visualization modality (VM; 2D vs. 3D). The largest upper alpha band power decrease was obtained during MI after a 3-dimensional visualization. In total in 12 out of 20 tasks the end-user of the 3D visualization group showed an enhanced upper alpha ERD relative to 2D VM group, with statistical significance in nine tasks.With a realistic visualization of the limb movements, we tried to increase motor cortex activation during subsequent MI. The feedback and the feedback environment should be inherently motivating and relevant for the learner and should have an appeal of novelty, real-world relevance or aesthetic value (Ryan and Deci, 2000; Merrill, 2007). Realistic visual feedback, consistent with the participant’s MI, might be helpful for accomplishing successful MI and the use of such feedback may assist in making BCI a more natural interface for MI based BCI rehabilitation

Representational deficit or processing effect? An electrophysiological study of noun-noun compound processing by very advanced L2 speakers of English

The processing of English noun-noun compounds (NNCs) was investigated to identify the extent and nature of differences between the performance of native speakers of English and advanced Spanish and German non-native speakers of English. The study sought to establish whether the word order of the equivalent structure in the non-native speakers' mothertongue (L1) had an influence on their processing of NNCs in their second language (L2), and whether this influence was due to differences in grammatical representation (i.e. incomplete acquisition of the relevant structure) or processing effects. Two mask-primed lexical decision experiments were conducted in which compounds were presented with their constituent nouns in licit versus reversed order. The first experiment used a speeded lexical decision task with reaction time registration, and the second a delayed lexical decision task with EEG registration. There were no significant group differences in accuracy in the licit word order condition, suggesting that the grammatical representation had been fully acquired by the non-native speakers. However, the Spanish speakers made slightly more errors with the reversed order and had longer response times, suggesting an L1 interference effect (as the reverse order matches the licit word order in Spanish). The EEG data, analysed with generalized additive mixed models, further supported this hypothesis. The EEG waveform of the non-native speakers was characterized by a slightly later onset N400 in the reversed constituent order. Compound frequency predicted the amplitude of the EEG signal for the licit word order for native speakers, but for the reversed constituent order for Spanish speakers - the licit order in their L1- supporting the hypothesis that Spanish speakers are affected by interferences from their L1