How useful are recoveries of North American passerines for survival analyses?

Of 17 000 000 passerines ringed in North America from 1955 to 1984, only 0.4% were ever recovered. Only 62 species had more than 100 recoveries, of which only 26 had more than 500 recoveries. Preliminary analyses using stochastic recovery models for four of the species with more than 500 recoveries suggest estimates of mean annual adult survival can be fairly precise (CV < 4%), but estimates of immature survival are much less precise (CV > 8%). Comparable estimates may be possible for other species with more than 100 recoveries, depending on the temporal and geographic distribution of ringings and recoveries. Further analyses are required to determine whether these estimates may be biased by heterogeneity in survival or recovery rates.     

Leverage and evaluation effectiveness

Weaknesses in evaluations often can be traced to structural limitations in the positions of evaluation researchers. Conventional human relations techniques often are an insufficient basis for securing strong support for evaluation research. Strategies for increasing evaluation research leverage are reviewed. Alignment of evaluation research with regulatory bodies with authority to suspend public program expenditures is advocated. Several likely obstacles in the development of the regulatory evaluation model are anticipated and addressed.     

Developing a research agenda in biogerontology: physiological systems

The Biology of Aging Program (BAP) at the National Institute on Aging supports research in many areas, including processes of cell senescence and apoptosis, genetic influences on aging, and how aging leads to tissue dysfunction. Several approaches to research on aging physiological systems are described, along with BAP programmatic efforts to enhance and support that research. Understanding the relation between aging and tissue dysfunction has led to new insights into how health can be improved for aged individuals.     

Understanding cultural singularities of ‘Indianness’ in an intercultural business setting

Analysing data from the Indian information technology (IT) industry, this paper advances an understanding of cultural singularities of ‘Indianness’. The research context of an intercultural meeting place of IT and business process outsourcing firms’ overseas subsidiaries, Belgium in this case, allows the authors to identify 10 cultural singularities that typify ‘Indianness’. This ethnographic, reflexive study is further validated by employing Ghoshal's ‘smell of the place’ metaphor through the authors collective experiences as consultants and researchers, and builds and extends upon the popular cultural dimension frameworks for understanding intercultural business and management. Existing cultural dimensions do not sufficiently describe the contemporary intercultural dynamics that typically take place in workplaces, especially so in offshore and outsourcing environments. A provisional set of parameters for understanding Indian culture, with its relevant impact on business life (customs and manners), business processes and business deliverables are proposed in this study.     

Bounded information dissemination in multi-channel wireless networks

More and more wireless networks and devices now operate on multiple channels, which poses the question: How to use multiple channels to speed up communication? In this paper, we answer this question for the case of wireless ad-hoc networks where information dissemination is a primitive operation. Specifically, we propose a randomized distributed algorithm for information dissemination that is very near the optimal. The general information dissemination problem is to deliver \(k\) information packets, stored initially in \(k\) different nodes (the packet holders), to all the nodes in the network, and the objective is to minimize the time needed. With an eye toward the reality, we assume a model where the packet holders are determined by an adversary, and neither the number \(k\) nor the identities of packet holders are known to the nodes in advance. Not knowing the value of \(k\) sets this problem apart from broadcasting and all-to-all communication (gossiping). We study the information dissemination problem in single-hop networks with bounded-size messages. We present a randomized algorithm which can disseminate all packets in \(O(k(\frac{1}{\mathcal {F}}+\frac{1}{\mathcal {P}})+\log ^2n)\) rounds with high probability, where \(\mathcal {F}\) is the number of available channels and \(\mathcal {P}\) is the bound on the number of packets a message can carry. Compared with the lower bound \(\varOmega (k(\frac{1}{\mathcal {F}}+\frac{1}{\mathcal {P}}))\), the given algorithm is very close to the asymptotical optimal except for an additive factor. Our result provides the first solid evidence that multiple channels can indeed substantially speed up information dissemination, which also breaks the \(\varOmega (k)\) lower bound that holds for single-channel networks (even if \(\mathcal {P}\) is infinity).     

Educational inequality across three generations in Australia

The transfer of advantage and disadvantage across multiple generations is receiving increasing attention in the international literature; however, transfers of resources across multiple generations in Australian families are less well understood. Using a longitudinal dataset of Australian children, we have the opportunity to not only investigate the transfer of educational resources across three generations in Australia, but also investigate the gendered nature of these transfers, which has been a limitation of other studies. We find no evidence of individual grandparent education effects on numeracy and reading scores for grandchildren in Year 3, independent of parent educational attainment and other covariates. However, significant effects on numeracy and reading scores were observed for children in families where both the grandmother and grandfather in maternal and paternal grandparent sets had high educational attainment (a diploma or university qualification), and where either or both the mother and father had a university qualification. These results suggest that the contribution of grandparents to the academic achievement of grandchildren cannot be fully explained by the parent generation and that the concentration of human capital in families contributes to educational inequalities across multiple generations that can be observed by eight years of age.     

Leadership across hierarchical levels: Multiple levels of management and multiple levels of analysis

We examined differences in leadership influence processes, perceptions, and multiple levels-of-analysis effects between close and distant charismatic and contingent reward leadership across three hierarchical levels in 13 Korean companies. Multi-source data revealed that followers' commitment to the leader mediated relationships between leadership and followers' attitudinal, behavioral, and performance outcomes in close situations, but not in distant relationships. Leadership at higher levels of management was positively related to leadership at the next lower level, which in turn related to follower outcomes at the lowest echelon. Multivariate within and between analysis indicated multiple-level effects differing by leader–follower distance and for the variables of interest.