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

Psychological determinants of whole-body endurance performance

Background: No literature reviews have systematically identified and evaluated research on the psychological determinants of endurance performance, and sport psychology performance-enhancement guidelines for endurance sports are not founded on a systematic appraisal of endurance-specific research. Objective: A systematic literature review was conducted to identify practical psychological interventions that improve endurance performance and to identify additional psychological factors that affect endurance performance. Additional objectives were to evaluate the research practices of included studies, to suggest theoretical and applied implications, and to guide future research. Methods: Electronic databases, forward-citation searches, and manual searches of reference lists were used to locate relevant studies. Peer-reviewed studies were included when they chose an experimental or quasi-experimental research design, a psychological manipulation, endurance performance as the dependent variable, and athletes or physically-active, healthy adults as participants. Results: Consistent support was found for using imagery, self-talk, and goal setting to improve endurance performance, but it is unclear whether learning multiple psychological skills is more beneficial than learning one psychological skill. The results also demonstrated that mental fatigue undermines endurance performance, and verbal encouragement and head-to-head competition can have a beneficial effect. Interventions that influenced perception of effort consistently affected endurance performance. Conclusions: Psychological skills training could benefit an endurance athlete. Researchers are encouraged to compare different practical psychological interventions, to examine the effects of these interventions for athletes in competition, and to include a placebo control condition or an alternative control treatment. Researchers are also encouraged to explore additional psychological factors that could have a negative effect on endurance performance. Future research should include psychological mediating variables and moderating variables. Implications for theoretical explanations of endurance performance and evidence-based practice are described

Search for the Decays B^0 -> D^{(*)+} D^{(*)-}

Using the CLEO-II data set we have searched for the Cabibbo-suppressed decays B^0 -> D^{(*)+} D^{(*)-}. For the decay B^0 -> D^{*+} D^{*-}, we observe one candidate signal event, with an expected background of 0.022 +/- 0.011 events. This yield corresponds to a branching fraction of Br(B^0 -> D^{*+} D^{*-}) = (5.3^{+7.1}_{-3.7}(stat) +/- 1.0(syst)) x 10^{-4} and an upper limit of Br(B^0 -> D^{*+} D^{*-}) D^{*\pm} D^\mp and B^0 -> D^+ D^-, no significant excess of signal above the expected background level is seen, and we calculate the 90% CL upper limits on the branching fractions to be Br(B^0 -> D^{*\pm} D^\mp) D^+ D^-) < 1.2 x 10^{-3}.Comment: 12 page postscript file also available through http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/public/CLNS, submitted to Physical Review Letter

The Evolution of the Epidemic of Charcoal-Burning Suicide in Taiwan: A Spatial and Temporal Analysis

Shu-Sen Chang and colleagues describe the epidemiology of an epidemic of suicide by charcoal burning in Taiwan and discuss possible reasons for its spread

Hepatic Abnormalities Associated with Aluminum Loading in Piglets

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141476/1/jpen0293.pd

Urban Biodiversity, City-Dwellers and Conservation: How Does an Outdoor Activity Day Affect the Human-Nature Relationship?

Urban conservation education programs aim to increase knowledge and awareness towards biodiversity and to change attitudes and behaviour towards the environment. However, to date, few urban conservation education studies have evaluated to what extent these programs have managed to achieve their goals. In this study, we experimentally explored the influence of an urban conservation activity day on individual knowledge, awareness and actions towards biodiversity, in both the short and longer term

Family physicians\u27 professional identity formation: a study protocol to explore impression management processes in institutional academic contexts.

BACKGROUND: Despite significant differences in terms of medical training and health care context, the phenomenon of medical students\u27 declining interest in family medicine has been well documented in North America and in many other developed countries as well. As part of a research program on family physicians\u27 professional identity formation initiated in 2007, the purpose of the present investigation is to examine in-depth how family physicians construct their professional image in academic contexts; in other words, this study will allow us to identify and understand the processes whereby family physicians with an academic appointment seek to control the ideas others form about them as a professional group, i.e. impression management. METHODS/DESIGN: The methodology consists of a multiple case study embedded in the perspective of institutional theory. Four international cases from Canada, France, Ireland and Spain will be conducted; the \u22case\u22 is the medical school. Four levels of analysis will be considered: individual family physicians, interpersonal relationships, family physician professional group, and organization (medical school). Individual interviews and focus groups with academic family physicians will constitute the main technique for data generation, which will be complemented with a variety of documentary sources. Discourse techniques, more particularly rhetorical analysis, will be used to analyze the data gathered. Within- and cross-case analysis will then be performed. DISCUSSION: This empirical study is strongly grounded in theory and will contribute to the scant body of literature on family physicians\u27 professional identity formation processes in medical schools. Findings will potentially have important implications for the practice of family medicine, medical education and health and educational policies

Adaptive independent sticky MCMC algorithms

Monte Carlo methods have become essential tools to solve complex Bayesian inference problems in different fields, such as computational statistics, machine learning, and statistical signal processing. In this work, we introduce a novel class of adaptive Monte Carlo methods, called adaptive independent sticky Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms, to sample efficiently from any bounded target probability density function (pdf). The new class of algorithms employs adaptive non-parametric proposal densities, which become closer and closer to the target as the number of iterations increases. The proposal pdf is built using interpolation procedures based on a set of support points which is constructed iteratively from previously drawn samples. The algorithm’s efficiency is ensured by a test that supervises the evolution of the set of support points. This extra stage controls the computational cost and the convergence of the proposal density to the target. Each part of the novel family of algorithms is discussed and several examples of specific methods are provided. Although the novel algorithms are presented for univariate target densities, we show how they can be easily extended to the multivariate context by embedding them within a Gibbs-type sampler or the hit and run algorithm. The ergodicity is ensured and discussed. An overview of the related works in the literature is also provided, emphasizing that several well-known existing methods (like the adaptive rejection Metropolis sampling (ARMS) scheme) are encompassed by the new class of algorithms proposed here. Eight numerical examples (including the inference of the hyper-parameters of Gaussian processes, widely used in machine learning for signal processing applications) illustrate the efficiency of sticky schemes, both as stand-alone methods to sample from complicated one-dimensional pdfs and within Gibbs samplers in order to draw from multi-dimensional target distributions

Visuospatial working memory in children and adolescents with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome; an fMRI study

22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11DS) is a genetic disorder associated with a microdeletion of chromosome 22q11. In addition to high rates of neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, children with 22q11DS have a specific neuropsychological profile with particular deficits in visuospatial and working memory. However, the neurobiological substrate underlying these deficits is poorly understood. We investigated brain function during a visuospatial working memory (SWM) task in eight children with 22q11DS and 13 healthy controls, using fMRI. Both groups showed task-related activation in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and bilateral parietal association cortices. Controls activated parietal and occipital regions significantly more than those with 22q11DS but there was no significant between-group difference in DLPFC. In addition, while controls had a significant age-related increase in the activation of posterior brain regions and an age-related decrease in anterior regions, the 22q11DS children showed the opposite pattern. Genetically determined differences in the development of specific brain systems may underpin the cognitive deficits in 22q11DS, and may contribute to the later development of neuropsychiatric disorders