The influence of economic context on the relationship between chief executive officer facial appearance and company profits

Inferences of leadership ability and personality from faces have been associated with leaders' efficacy across multiple domains. One influential factor that has only been scarcely explored, however, is the context in which leadership occurs. The present studies examined the effect of two such contextual variables: economic conditions across time and economic conditions across nations. In Study 1, inferences of leadership ability from the faces of American Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) predicted their companies' financial performance prior to the Financial Crisis of 2008 but not after. In Study 2, traits previously found to predict the success of American CEOs before the Financial Crisis (i.e., Power) predicted the success of CEOs in Germany in the year following the crisis but not in the US, consistent with the differential impact of the international recession in the two nations. These results suggest that economic events may affect the relationship between facial appearance and business leaders' success.     

Endogenous Liquidity and Defaultable Bonds

This paper studies the interaction between default and liquidity for corporate bonds that are traded in an over‐the‐counter secondary market with search frictions. Bargaining with dealers determines a bond's endogenous liquidity, which depends on both the firm fundamental and the time‐to‐maturity of the bond. Corporate default decisions interact with the endogenous secondary market liquidity via the rollover channel. A default‐liquidity loop arises: Assuming a relative illiquid secondary bond market in default, earlier endogenous default worsens a bond's secondary market liquidity, which amplifies equity holders' rollover losses, which in turn leads to earlier endogenous default. Besides characterizing in closed form the full interdependence between liquidity and default for credit spreads, our calibrated model can jointly match empirically observed credit spreads and liquidity measures of bonds across different rating classes.     

People Automatically Extract Infants’ Sex from Faces

People can reliably distinguish the sex of faces across age groups. Rates of accuracy are lower for infants, however, likely because they lack the pronounced sexually dimorphic features that develop during puberty. Given that previous research has shown that perceivers categorize adult sex automatically, we wondered whether this would extend to the faces of infants for whom sex is less legible. We tested this using a semantic priming paradigm in which infant faces preceded the categorization of stereotypically male and female names. Results showed that participants categorized the sex of male names significantly faster following perceptions of male versus female infant faces (though female faces did not significantly facilitate the processing of female names). The asymmetry in interference for male but not female faces supports evidence for a male default in conceptions of sex among infants previously found for adults. Individuals may therefore process sex automatically in the absence of overt cues (e.g., post-pubertal sexually dimorphic features or stereotypical clothing), providing additional evidence for the depth and flexibility of social categorization.     

Prerequisites of efficient decentralized waste heat recovery and energy storage in production planning

Following the scarcity of resources, rising energy prices, and an increasing awareness of the role manufacturing plays in the generation of greenhouse gas emissions, the usage of energy has more and more been considered in research on production planning and scheduling in recent years. Time-varying energy prices, which have been introduced to penalize energy usage during peak-demand periods and which are supposed to smooth energy demand, have added a new aspect to this stream of research. This article studies how the integration of a waste heat recovery system, which can convert industrial waste heat into electrical energy, along with an electrical energy storage system can balance the positive and negative effects of energy peak prices on the production plan in a serial multi-stage production system. After developing an appropriate model, we investigate how the use of the waste heat recovery system and the electrical energy storage system impact production planning. In a numerical analysis, we investigate under which conditions the recovery of waste heat combined with the opportunity to store energy provides practitioners with an efficient tool to lower total energy usage and to better react to time-varying energy prices, and thus to reduce total energy cost.     

信息科学发展前景展望

计算科学这一术语所能涵盖的内容不能完全包容信息科学和计算机基础设施这样一些领域,有必要确立一个与信息科学领域的发展相适应的新的复杂综合研究的领域.这个新的复杂综合研究领域应当建立在已经形成的技术、社会、生物和物理信息科学的综合发展的水平上,并为其他一些领域中的较低层次的一般性问题的研究提供理论基础.信息技术应该成为自然科学的一部分,未来的信息技术应当侧重于对人的问题的研究,并能够有助于提高人的素质.在未来十年内将会形成一个新的科学世界图景,其中一个重要的领域将会属于信息和信息过程.我们认为,正是在包括生物信息学、纳米信息学、量子信息学等一系列新兴的信息科学和技术领域中所实现的变革,而不是信息和通信技术的大众化推广,使人类社会文明过渡到了一个新水平——以知识为基础的信息社会.     

p-Value adjustment to control type I errors in linear regression models

The paper is devoted to a new randomization method that yields unbiased adjustments of p-values for linear regression model predictors by incorporating the number of potential explanatory variables, their variance–covariance matrix and its uncertainty, based on the number of observations. This adjustment helps control type I errors in scientific studies, significantly decreasing the number of publications that report false relations to be authentic ones. Comparative analysis with such existing methods as Bonferroni correction and Shehata and White adjustments explicitly shows their imperfections, especially in case when the number of observations and the number of potential explanatory variables are approximately equal. Proposed method is easy to program and can be integrated into any statistical software package.     

信息哲学与现代信息科学的基本问题

现代信息科学中的哲学和科学的方法论问题,已经被认为是基础科学和复杂性科学发展的方向。由于信息科学和基础科学发展前景的沟通,这些问题已经形成了一个在整体上相互关联的问题系列。     

Expert Review on Poliovirus Immunity and Transmission

Successfully managing risks to achieve wild polioviruses (WPVs) eradication and address the complexities of oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) cessation to stop all cases of paralytic poliomyelitis depends strongly on our collective understanding of poliovirus immunity and transmission. With increased shifting from OPV to inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV), numerous risk management choices motivate the need to understand the tradeoffs and uncertainties and to develop models to help inform decisions. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hosted a meeting of international experts in April 2010 to review the available literature relevant to poliovirus immunity and transmission. This expert review evaluates 66 OPV challenge studies and other evidence to support the development of quantitative models of poliovirus transmission and potential outbreaks. This review focuses on characterization of immunity as a function of exposure history in terms of susceptibility to excretion, duration of excretion, and concentration of excreted virus. We also discuss the evidence of waning of host immunity to poliovirus transmission, the relationship between the concentration of poliovirus excreted and infectiousness, the importance of different transmission routes, and the differences in transmissibility between OPV and WPV. We discuss the limitations of the available evidence for use in polio risk models, and conclude that despite the relatively large number of studies on immunity, very limited data exist to directly support quantification of model inputs related to transmission. Given the limitations in the evidence, we identify the need for expert input to derive quantitative model inputs from the existing data.