Self and followers’ assessment of four key leadership areas: an action research

The aim of this study is to explore how a leader of an organization performs on four key leadership areas as perceived and assessed by himself through reflection and as appraised by his followers and investigate the implications of the findings of the study to leadership in the Ethiopian context. The research is basically a descriptive action research that aims to explore the performance of a leader of a public training and consultancy institute using instruments that measure four key areas of leadership, namely, ten leadership qualities, type of power used by the leader, his role in establishing and leading teams and his emotional intelligence. To this end, two sets of questionnaires for each of the areas of leadership were administered to be filled in by the leader himself and by a sample of his followers drawn from all key divisions of the organization. A total of 20 subjects (about 40% of the total population) including the leader filled in the questionnaires. Findings indicated that on the whole the leader and followers rated differently the leader‟s performance on most of the areas of leadership though insignificantly. The leader scored better and higher on most areas compared to others‟ rating on his performance. Based on the findings of the study, points of agreement and disagreement between how the leader perceived himself and how he is perceived by followers are explored, and actions are suggested to improve as needed.Key words: leadership effectiveness, self-assessment, followers‟ assessment, action researc

Error correcting method and apparatus Patent

Description of error correcting methods for use with digital data computers and apparatus for encoding and decoding digital dat

Chaotic diffusion of particles with finite mass in oscillating convection flows

Deterministic diffusion in temporally oscillating convection is studied for particles with finite mass. The particles are assumed to obey a simple dissipative dynamical system and the particle diffusion is induced by the strange attractor. The diffusion constants are numerically calculated for convection models with free and rigid boundary conditions.Comment: 5 figure

Effect of Congenital Versus Acquired Varus on Patient-Reported Outcomes After High Tibial Osteotomy

ABSTRACT Objectives: 1) To determine the inter-rater reliability of tibial bone varus angle (TBVA) measurements. 2) To compare patient-reported outcomes after medial opening wedge high tibial osteotomy (HTO) in patients with congenital versus acquired varus. Methods: Two raters measured TBVA from preoperative whole-limb standing anteroposterior radiographs (n=74). Patients completed Knee Osteoarthritis Outcome Scores (KOOS) before and 5 years after surgery. The sample was first divided into two groups based on preoperative congenital (TBVA\u3e5°) or acquired (TBVA≤5°) varus, then three groups based on tertiles for TBVA. Results: Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) suggested excellent inter-rater reliability (ICC2,1=0.78; ICC2,2=0.88). Repeated measures analysis of variance suggested no significant difference in the increase in KOOS scores between groups. Although patients in the highest TBVA tertile had higher KOOS scores before and after surgery, increases were similar among groups. Conclusions: Improvements in patient-reported outcomes after medial opening wedge HTO are similar for patients with congenital and acquired varus. Key terms: tibial bone varus angle; tbva; knee; osteoarthritis; high tibial osteotomy; inter-rater reliability; patient reported outcome

Essays on the Effects of Early Childhood Malnutrition, Family Preferences and Personal Choices on Child Health and Schooling

This dissertation consists of three essays investigating the role of early life events, family environment and personal choices in shaping a child’s chances for human capital accumulation. The first essay examines how physical stature of a child measured in terms of age standardized height influences his/her selection for family labor activities vs. schooling in rural Ethiopia using malnutrition caused by exposure to significant weather shocks in early childhood as sources of identification for the child’s physical stature. We find no evidence that better physical stature of the child leads to his/her positive selection for full-time child labor activities. On the other hand we found reasonably strong and consistent evidence that physically more robust children are more likely to combine child labor and schooling than physically weaker children. The findings indicate that, although better early childhood nutrition leads to higher chances of attending school, it may also put the child at additional pressure to participate in family labor activities which may be reflected in poor performance in schooling. The second essay empirically investigates whether the quantity deficit in the children of the mother’s preferred gender is compensated through their favorable treatment in terms of investment in schooling and nutrition (referred to as compensating hypothesis) and to what extent the mother uses her bargaining power in the family to influence this process. We use data from siblings and twins in two rounds of the demographic and health surveys of Ethiopia with robustness checks using a similar but larger data set from India. We find the mother’s bargaining power working in the opposite direction to that of the compensating hypothesis in the case of child schooling and having no substantive role in the case of child nutritional health. Our findings for child schooling imply that mother’s empowerment could turn out to be unfavorable to a child’s attendance of schooling in the circumstances where the child is needed to help out with family activities. In the third essay we use date from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of the Youth (NLSY97) to examine the extent to which high school completion (and to a limited extent college enrollment) are influenced by the choice teenagers make as to when to start dating and/or engage in sex, how many dating and/or sex partners to maintain, and how frequently to engage in sexual and/or dating activities. We use indicators of parental and peer religiosity as instruments for teenager’s involvement in sex and dating activities. While our results for teenage dating are generally weaker than those for teenage sex, the overall pattern of our estimates suggests that teenage sex and dating could have significant effects not only on high school completion but also the subsequent enrollment in a college

Impact of Social Media on Economic Growth - Evidence from Social Media

This paper attempts to investigate the impact of social media on economic growth. Using information obtained from memberships to social networks, we find that social media has a negative and significant impact on economic growth. This provides evidence in favour of our hypothesis that social media increases the search costs for information and also increases the substitution effect from labour to leisure thereby producing a negative impact on growth

Innovation flow through social networks: Productivity distribution

A detailed empirical analysis of the productivity of non financial firms across several countries and years shows that productivity follows a non-Gaussian distribution with power law tails. We demonstrate that these empirical findings can be interpreted as consequence of a mechanism of exchanges in a social network where firms improve their productivity by direct innovation or/and by imitation of other firm's technological and organizational solutions. The type of network-connectivity determines how fast and how efficiently information can diffuse and how quickly innovation will permeate or behaviors will be imitated. From a model for innovation flow through a complex network we obtain that the expectation values of the productivity level are proportional to the connectivity of the network of links between firms. The comparison with the empirical distributions reveals that such a network must be of a scale-free type with a power-law degree distribution in the large connectivity range.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Factors predisposing to rhegmatogenous retinal detachment among Ethiopians

Aim: To determine and describe the causes and risk factors predisposing Ethiopian patients to rhegmatogenous retinal detachment (RRD). Methods: A retrospective study of all patients with RRD seen at the retina clinic of Menilik II Hospital, Addis Ababa, from April 1999 to October 2003 was done. Charts of patients with the diagnosis of RRD were collected and data were filled on structured questionnaires and analyzed using EPI INFO 6 software. Results: Data were available for 276 patients (305 eyes) in whom the diagnosis of RRD was made. Age of patients ranged from 7-85 years; mean age was 41 and median was 40 years. Hundred-eighty-eight [68%] of the patients were males and 88 [32%] were females with male-to-female ratio of 2.1:1. Myopia was the predisposing factor for RRD in 78 [28.3%] patients of which 63 had myopia of > 5D. In 57 [20.7%] patients with RRD, there was a history of ocular trauma. Thirty-nine [14.2%] patients had had cataract surgery with lens implantation and 21 [7.6%] patients were surgically aphakic. Macula-off RRD was seen in 225 [73.8%] eyes. Bilateral RRD was seen in 29 [10.5%] patients. Conclusion: The study showed that myopia, ocular trauma, pseudophakia and aphakia in decreasing frequency were the main risk factors associated with RRD among Ethiopians attending a tertiary eye care centre