Sustaining an Organization in the Midst of Chaos

Sustainability is a popular topic that influences almost every area of life and industry. Using the 2008 recession as the crisis examined, we will take a look at how several leaders have handled economic, environmental, and organizational responsibility and sustainability in the midst of chaos. We will then tie those examples together within the realm of systems thinking, highlighting how leaders need to see the interconnected nature of systems in order to effectively respond to crises

Nanosecond electro-optical switching with a repetition rate above 20MHz

We describe an electro-optical switch based on a commercial electro-optic modulator (modified for high-speed operation) and a 340V pulser having a rise time of 2.2ns (at 250V). It can produce arbitrary pulse patterns with an average repetition rate beyond 20MHz. It uses a grounded-grid triode driven by transmitting power transistors. We discuss variations that enable analog operation, use the step-recovery effect in bipolar transistors, or offer other combinations of output voltage, size, and cost.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures. Minor change

Complexity Leadership: The First Two Decades

Complexity leadership, complex adaptive leadership, and adaptive leadership theories are related but separate streams of leadership research dating back four decades. This article reviews the first two decades. The research team searched academic literature within the business discipline for journal articles related to complex adaptive leadership, complexity leadership, and adaptive leadership, resulting in a sample of 778 articles. The researchers used multiple methods to analyze the articles, eventually conducting deductive analysis on a subset of nine articles published between 1982-2002. Analysis from the sample revealed frustration by some leadership scholars over the ability of leadership theory to address practical leadership problems. Therefore, scholars called for and began to develop novel approaches beyond concepts of leader-follower influence. Scholars turned their attention to understanding the role of leadership within VUCA contexts. They began to conceive of organizations as open systems and to describe characteristics that leaders would need to be successful in complex adaptive systems. These early attempts set the stage for scholars to apply complexity theory to the study of leadership

Spatial audio in small display screen devices

Our work addresses the problem of (visual) clutter in mobile device interfaces. The solution we propose involves the translation of technique-from the graphical to the audio domain-for expliting space in information representation. This article presents an illustrative example in the form of a spatialisedaudio progress bar. In usability tests, participants performed background monitoring tasks significantly more accurately using this spatialised audio (a compared with a conventional visual) progress bar. Moreover, their performance in a simultaneously running, visually demanding foreground task was significantly improved in the eye-free monitoring condition. These results have important implications for the design of multi-tasking interfaces for mobile devices

Robotic swarm connectivity with human operation and bandwidth limitations

Human interaction with robot swarms (HSI) is a young field with very few user studies that explore operator behavior. All these studies assume perfect communication between the operator and the swarm. A key challenge in the use of swarm robotic systems in human supervised tasks is to understand human swarm interaction in the presence of limited communication bandwidth, which is a constraint arising in many practical scenarios. In this paper, we present results of human-subject experiments designed to study the effect of bandwidth limitations in human swarm interaction. We consider three levels of bandwidth availability in a swarm foraging task. The lowest bandwidth condition performs poorly, but the medium and high bandwidth condition both perform well. In the medium bandwidth condition, we display useful aggregated swarm information (like swarm centroid and spread) to compress the swarm state information. We also observe interesting operator behavior and adaptation of operators' swarm reaction

Effect of time at temperature on wild poliovirus titers in stool specimens

AbstractBackgroundThe effect of transport temperature on the viability of poliovirus in stool specimens from paralyzed cases has not been tested. Quality assurance of programmatic indicators will be necessary in the final phase of polio eradication.ObjectiveTo estimate the effect of time at elevated temperatures on wild poliovirus titers in stool specimens.MethodsWe exposed aliquots of pooled wild poliovirus type 1 specimens to elevated temperatures (27°C, 31°C, and 35°C) for varying time periods up to 14 days. We determined the virus titer of these aliquots and created decay curves at each temperature to estimate the relationship between time at temperature and virus titer.ResultsWe found significantly different slopes of decay at each temperature. The negative slopes increased as the temperature increased.ConclusionsWhile poliovirus in stool remains relatively stable at moderately elevated temperature, transport at higher temperatures could impact sample integrity and virus isolation results

Investigating neglect benevolence and communication latency during human-swarm interaction

In practical applications of robot swarms with bioinspired behaviors, a human operator will need to exert control over the swarm to fulfill the mission objectives. In many operational settings, human operators are remotely located and the communication environment is harsh. Hence, there exists some latency in information (or control command) transfer between the human and the swarm. In this paper, we conduct experiments of human-swarm interaction to investigate the effects of communication latency on the performance of a humanswarm system in a swarm foraging task.We develop and investigate the concept of neglect benevolence, where a human operator allows the swarm to evolve on its own and stabilize before giving new commands. Our experimental results indicate that operators exploited neglect benevolence in different ways to develop successful strategies in the foraging task. Furthermore, we show experimentally that the use of a predictive display can help mitigate the adverse effects of communication latency