Incentives and Gender in a Multi-task Setting: an Experimental Study with Real-Effort Tasks

This paper investigates the behavioural effects of competitive, social-value and social-image incentives on men’s and women’s allocation of effort in a multi-task environment. Specifically, using two real-effort laboratory tasks, we investigate how competitive prizes, social-value generation and public awards affect effort allocation decisions between the tasks. We find that all three types of incentives significantly focus effort allocation towards the task they are applied in, but the effect varies significantly between men and women. The highest effort distortion lies with competitive incentives, which is due to the effort allocation decision of men. Women exert similar amount of effort across the three incentive conditions, with slightly lower effort levels in the social-image incentivized tasks. Our results inform how and why genders differences may persist in competitive workplaces

TERRORIST GROUP BRANDS: UNDERSTANDING TERRORIST GROUP STRATEGIES THROUGH MEASURING BRAND AWARENESS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Terrorist groups such as the Islamic State adopted commercial marketing principles and effectively communicated with the targeted audience through social media to enhance operational achievements on the ground. This thesis investigates the role of effective brand awareness management in achieving terrorist group aims. The researcher seeks to quantify the Islamic State’s brand awareness among the populations in Syria and Iraq by measuring references to the terrorist group among these populations in the content appearing on the social media platform Twitter, during the period of August 1, 2013, through July 31, 2014. This thesis contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms utilized by armed actors by providing an analysis of the conditions of success of Islamic State propaganda within the areas under its control. Such knowledge can help direct more attention to targeting communication links with targeted populations. The results show that Islamic State brand awareness was higher in areas with more developed communication infrastructure, lower population density, and higher levels of historical violence. The results of this thesis further confirm the hypothesis that terrorist groups can increase the population’s awareness of their brand through violence as a medium of communication with targeted populations.Lieutenant Colonel, Jordanian Armed ForcesApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

A 28 GHz 0.18-μm CMOS cascade power amplifier with reverse body bias technique

A 28 GHz power amplifier (PA) using CMOS 0.18 μm Silterra process technology is reported. The cascade configuration has been adopted to obtain high Power Added Efficiency (PAE). To achieve low power consumption, the input stage adopts reverse body bias technique. The simulation results show that the proposed PA consumes 32.03mW and power gain (S21) of 9.51 dB is achieved at 28 GHz. The PA achieves saturated power (Psat) of 11.10 dBm and maximum PAE of 16.55% with output 1-dB compression point (OP1dB) 8.44 dBm. These results demonstrate the proposed power amplifier architecture is suitable for 5G applications

Data for proteome analysis of Bacillus lehensis G1 in starch-containing medium

Bacillus lehensis G1 is a cyclodextrin glucanotransferase (CGTase) producer, which can degrade starch into cyclodextrin. Here, we present the proteomics data of B. lehensis cultured in starch-containing medium, which is related to the article “Proteome-based identification of signal peptides for improved secretion of recombinant cyclomaltodextrin glucanotransferase in Escherichia coli” (Ling et. al, in press). This dataset was generated to better understand the secretion of proteins involved in starch utilization for bacterial sustained growth. A 2-DE proteomic technique was used and the proteins were tryptically digested followed by detection using MALDI-TOF/TOF. Proteins were classified into functional groups using the information available in SubtiList webserver (http://genolist.pasteur.fr/SubtiList/)

Application of an Equilibrium Vaporization Model to the Ablation of Chondritic and Achondritic Meteoroids

We modeled equilibrium vaporization of chondritic and achondritic materials using the MAGMA code. We calculated both instantaneous and integrated element abundances of Na, Mg, Ca, Al, Fe, Si, Ti, and K in chondritic and achondritic meteors. Our results are qualitatively consistent with observations of meteor spectra.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; in press, Earth, Moon, and Planets, Meteoroids 2004 conference proceeding

Adapting the Smart-seq2 Protocol for Robust Single Worm RNA-seq.

Most nematodes are small worms that lack enough RNA for regular RNA-seq protocols without pooling hundred to thousand of individuals. We have adapted the Smart-seq2 protocol in order to sequence the transcriptome of an individual worm. While developed for individual Steinernema carpocapsae and Caenorhabditis elegans larvae as well as embryos, the protocol should be adaptable for other nematode species and small invertebrates. In addition, we describe how to analyze the RNA-seq results using the Galaxy online environment. We expect that this method will be useful for the studying gene expression variances of individual nematodes in wild type and mutant backgrounds

Evaluation of Double Loop IC Module for Inductive Coupled Fed RFID Tag Wire Embedded Antenna

This paper presents an evaluation on double loop integrated circuit module for inductive couple fed RFID Tag. The inductive couple feed gives advantage especially for flexible wire embedded antenna in controlling the manufacturing varians as the chip is not directly connected to the antenna. Thus electrostatic discharged effect and manufacturing errors can be minimized. An inductor loop is directly connected to the RFID chip before it is placed to indirectly coupled the energy from a meandered dipole antenna. The coupled energy should be enough to turn on the chip to communicate with the reader. The inductive coupled energy is achieved by manipulating the near field magnetic field between the antenna body and the inductor loop. To evaluate the performance, the antenna and the inductive feeding loop is designed to operate at RFID UHF band (860 MHz – 960 MHz) and simulated using CST software. The antenna body impedance is evaluated to match the impedance of the chip and the loop. It is confirmed that the double loop inductor has higher inductance values and thus should be counted in conjugate impedance between the antenna body and the chip module. The tag with overall dimension of 60 mm x 16 mm can be read at distance at least 9 meters through out the band

Compressive strength prediction of lightweight short columns at elevated temperature using gene expression programing and artificial neural network

The experimental behavior of reinforced concrete elements exposed to fire is limited in the literature. Although there are few experimental programs that investigate the behavior of lightweight short columns, there is still a lack of formulation that can accurately predict their ultimate load at elevated temperature. Thus, new equations are proposed in this study to predict the compressive strength of the lightweight short column using Gene Expression Programming (GEP) and Artificial neural networks (ANN). A total of 83 data set is used to establish GEP and ANN models where 70% of the data are used for training and 30% of the data are used for validation and testing. The predicting variables are temperature, concrete compressive strength, steel yield strength, and spacing between stirrups. The developed models are compared with the ACI equation for short columns. The results have shown that the GEP and ANN models have a strong potential to predict the compressive strength of the lightweight short column. The predicted compressive strengths of short lightweight columns using the GEP and ANN models are closer to the experimental results than that obtained using the ACI equations