Leadership Adapted: Towards an Understanding of How Western-Developed Leadership Theories are Translated and Practiced in the Modern Arab Middle East

The purpose of this study is to understand how western-developed leadership theories are translated and practiced in the Modern Arab Middle East (MAME). Over the past century the notion of leadership has progressed through phases of understanding, definition, and practice. This evolution continues today and is no longer contained to the academic and practice-oriented institutions of North America and Europe. Through western-styled educational institutions and professional industries, western-developed leadership theories have stretched around the globe, including the MAME. While this is known, what is much less understood is how these theories are adopted and adapted. This study’s objective is to understand what theories of leadership are taught at Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs in the Modern Arab Middle East and how are they applied in local contexts. The research design was qualitative, interpretivist, and exploratory in nature. Data was collected from the MBA programs, their faculty alumni, and by the observations of the researcher. Publicly available documents were gathered by from online sources and during visits to the programs. Interviewed with respondents were conducted both in-person and through phone and digital conversations. Documents and transcripts were catalogued and thematically analyzed with the resulting themes constituting the findings of the study. The first set of findings centers around the question of how leadership is situated as well as what leadership theories are taught and how. It was found that leadership is professed to be highly valued, is broadly defined, and that is taught through traditional educational methods. The second set of findings pertain to what practitioners do with this education. It was found that leadership was spoken of in nine ways: local, regional, and internationally; a changing environment; entrepreneurship; family business; management preferred over leadership, and professional or personal development. Additionally, respondents reported that they experience the concept of leadership to be enigmatic, for a few, and future oriented. This study is hoped to be one of a series to come that considers how western-leadership theory is used in the MAME with an aim that theory may be useful and congruent within local and regional contexts

Comparison of model selection techniques for seafloor scattering statistics

In quantitative analysis of seafloor imagery, it is common to model the collection of individual pixel intensities scattered by the seafloor as a random variable with a given statistical distribution. There is a considerable literature on statistical models for seafloor scattering, mostly focused on areas with statistically homogeneous properties (i.e. exhibiting spatial stationarity). For more complex seafloors, the pixel intensity distribution is more appropriately modeled using a mixture of simple distributions. For very complex seafloors, fitting 3 or more mixture components makes physical sense, but the statistical model becomes much more complex in these cases. Therefore, picking the number of components of the mixture model is a decision that must be made, using a priori information, or using a data driven approach. However, this information is time consuming to collect, and depends on the skill and experience of the human. Therefore, a data-driven approach is advantageous to use, and is explored in this work. Criteria for choosing a model always need to balance the trade-off for the best fit for the data on the one hand and the model complexity on the other hand. In this work, we compare several statistical model selection criteria, e.g., the Bayesian information criterion. Examples are given for SAS data collected by an autonomous underwater vehicle in a rocky environment off the coast of Bergen, Norway using data from the HISAS-1032 synthetic aperture sonar system.Comment: Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Synthetic Aperture Radar and Sonar, Lyric Italy, September 202

The small-slope approximation for layered, fluid seafloors

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0000470The small-slope approximation (SSA) for rough-interface scattering is most commonly applied to the upper bound ary of either impenetrable media or uniform half-space media, but has been recently developed for layered media in the acoustic and electromagnetic cases. The present work gives an overview of three forms of the SSA for layered media. The first has been previously presented in the acoustics literature. The second is from the electromagnetics literature and in the present work is converted to the fluid-sediment problem. A missing proof is supplied of a key consistency condition demanded of the small-slope ansatz. As is usual, these small-slope results are expressed in k-space. A third SSA for layered seafloors follows from conversion of the usual half-space formulation from k-space to coordinate space. This form turns out to be useful for reverberation simulations. The three different approaches are compared with respect to scattering strength and the coherent reflection coefficient, but an assessment of their relative merits will require comparison with exact calculations.U.S. Office of Naval Researc

Scattering statistics of rock outcrops: Model-data comparisons and Bayesian inference using mixture distributions

The probability density function of the acoustic field amplitude scattered by the seafloor was measured in a rocky environment off the coast of Norway using a synthetic aperture sonar system, and is reported here in terms of the probability of false alarm. Interpretation of the measurements focused on finding appropriate class of statistical models (single versus two-component mixture models), and on appropriate models within these two classes. It was found that two-component mixture models performed better than single models. The two mixture models that performed the best (and had a basis in the physics of scattering) were a mixture between two K distributions, and a mixture between a Rayleigh and generalized Pareto distribution. Bayes' theorem was used to estimate the probability density function of the mixture model parameters. It was found that the K-K mixture exhibits significant correlation between its parameters. The mixture between the Rayleigh and generalized Pareto distributions also had significant parameter correlation, but also contained multiple modes. We conclude that the mixture between two K distributions is the most applicable to this dataset.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, Accepted to the Journal of the Acoustical Society of Americ

Resolution dependence of rough surface scattering using a power law roughness spectrum

Contemporary high-resolution sonar systems use broadband pulses and long arrays to achieve high resolution. It is important to understand effects that high-resolution sonar systems might have on quantitative measures of the scattered field due to the seafloor. A quantity called the broadband scattering cross section is defined, appropriate for high-resolution measurements. The dependence of the broadband scattering cross section, $\sigma_{bb}$ and the scintillation index, $SI$ on resolution was investigated for one-dimensional rough surfaces with power-law spectra and backscattering geometries. Using integral equations and Fourier synthesis, no resolution dependence of $\sigma_{bb}$ was found. The incoherently-averaged frequency-domain scattering cross section has negligible bandwidth dependence. $SI$ increases as resolution increases, grazing angle decreases, and spectral strength increases. This trend is confirmed for center frequencies of 100 kHz and 10 kHz, as well as for power-law spectral exponents of 1.5, 2, and 2.5. The hypothesis that local tilting at the scale of the acoustic resolution is responsible for intensity fluctuations was examined using a representative model for the effect of slopes (inspired by the composite roughness approximation). It was found that slopes are responsible in part for the fluctuations, but other effects, such as multiple scattering and shadowing may also play a role.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, preprint version of paper published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, at \url{https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0002974

Interface Controlled Thermal Resistances of Ultra-Thin Chalcogenide-Based Phase Change Memory Devices

Phase change memory (PCM) is a rapidly growing technology that not only offers advancements in storage-class memories but also enables in-memory data processing to overcome the von Neumann bottleneck. In PCMs, data storage is driven by thermal excitation. However, there is limited research regarding PCM thermal properties at length scales close to the memory cell dimensions. Our work presents a new paradigm to manage thermal transport in memory cells by manipulating the interfacial thermal resistance between the phase change unit and the electrodes without incorporating additional insulating layers. Experimental measurements show a substantial change in interfacial thermal resistance as GST transitions from cubic to hexagonal crystal structure, resulting in a factor of 4 reduction in the effective thermal conductivity. Simulations reveal that interfacial resistance between PCM and its adjacent layer can reduce the reset current for 20 and 120 nm diameter devices by up to ~ 40% and ~ 50%, respectively. These thermal insights present a new opportunity to reduce power and operating currents in PCMs