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Anthropomorphomania and the Rise of the Animal Mind: A Conversation
Get PDFThe conversation that follows concerns patterns of thinking. Comparative psychologist Daniel Povinelli, in conversation with folklorist Brandon Barker, argues that certain anthropomorphizing notions have impeded scientists' attempts to answer these questions: How are animals and humans the same? How are animals and humans different? This conversation supplements other considerations of the Aesop's Fable Paradigm in this special issue by articulating the perspective of an insider to both the science and the culture of comparative psychology, animal cognition, and their related disciplines
Some relations on prefix reversal generators of the symmetric and hyperoctahedral group
Get PDFThe symmetric group Sn and the group of signed permutations Bn (also referred to as the hyperoctahedral group) can be generated by prefixreversal permutations. A natural question is to determine the order of the “Coxeter-like” products formed by multiplying two generators, and in general, the relations satisfied by the prefix-reversal generators (also known as pancake generators or pancake flips). The order of these products is related to the length of certain cycles in the pancake and burnt pancake graphs. Using this connection, we derive a description of the order of the product of any two of these generators from a result due to Konstantinova and Medvedev. We provide a partial description of the order of the product of three generators when one of the generators is the transposition (1, 2). Furthermore, we describe the order of the product of two prefix-reversal generators in the hyperoctahedral group and give connections to the length of certain cycles in the burnt pancake graph
University-Based Teacher Supervisors: Their Voices, Their Dilemmas
Get PDFDespite university supervisors’ critical role in the success of PK-12 teacher candidates, research is limited on how to best prepare supervisors to mentor their supervisees and interact with cooperating teachers and school administrators. By using two surveys and a focus group meeting, this qualitative study explores supervisors’ experiences to surface dilemmas of supervisory practice. Results indicate supervisors suffer overwhelming workloads, feel marginalized by their institutions, lack ongoing training, and are often unclear as to what their role is. The success of the cadres of clinical supervisors ultimately depends on training, but more crucially on full engagement by their home institutions
Contracting in the Smart Era: The Implications of Blockchain and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations for Contracting and Corporate Governance
Get PDFThis paper explores blockchain technology’s potential to alter contracting both in the market and within organizations. We identify and discuss how blockchain reduces certain types of transaction costs while introducing additional costs that have not been present in traditional contracts. Blockchain technology also presents a new method to mitigate or avoid certain types of agency costs that stem from contracting with agents inside the firm. Through this theoretical discussion, our paper proposes several avenues for future research on how blockchain may alter contracting
International Lawyers as Disrupters of Corruption: Business and Human Rights in Africa's Most Populous Country—Nigeria
Get PDFBe it bribery, embezzlement, or the abuse of public trust, corruption poses a major challenge to global security and democratic governance, along with undermining the rule of law, especially within the Global South. Key to this phenomenon is understanding how lawyers are enabling but also disrupting this epidemic. Unfortunately, the literature on this subject is lacking. This study, therefore, offers a nuanced story of globalization and the complicated role that lawyers play in corruption, by relying on the case study of Nigeria—a crucial Global South market that has the largest population on the African continent. While Nigeria has been able to remain a democracy since 1999 (albeit fragilely), private sector and government officials, including the current Nigerian president, concede that corruption is the country’s biggest problem. At the same time, as this study demonstrates, in Nigeria today there is a small but growing group of globally experienced lawyers who are aggressively resisting the entrenched corruption that besieges this environment. By virtue of the opportunities provided by globalization, this cohort is not bound to the parochial interests that have long harmed Nigeria. Yet, these lawyers also work within a larger profession that is conservative, complicated, and at times itself corrupt. Thus, to what extent do these factors affect the ability of these globally focused lawyers to enact change? The answer to this question is critical because it helps to unlock an enduring puzzle as to which agents are best situated to lead a country out of its mired, corrupt history and onto the global stage as a respected power. For other nations, particularly in the Global South, that are also seeking to strengthen their rule of law regimes, the lessons from this study will be instructive in determining whether lawyers who value—and are part of—global networks are capable of curbing corruption within their own domestic contexts
Exploring problem decomposition and program development through block-based programs
Get PDFAlthough teachers need to assess computational thinking (CT) for computer science education in K-12, it is not easy for them to evaluate students’ programs based on the perspective. The purpose of this study was to investigate students’ CT skills reflected in their Scratch programs. The context of the study was a middle school coding club where seven students voluntarily participated in a five-week coding activity. A total of eleven Scratch programs were analyzed in two aspects: problem decomposition and program development. Results revealed that students demonstrated proper decompositions of problems, which supported program development processes. However, in some cases, students failed to decompose necessary parts as their projects got sophisticated, which resulted in the failure or errors of programs. Regarding program development, algorythmic thinking had been identified as the area to be improved. Debugging and evaluation of programs were the necessary process students needed to practice. Implications for teaching CT skills were discussed
Within-Industry Specialization and Global Market Power
Get PDFExport price levels exhibit tremendous cross-national and spatial variation, even within narrowly defined industries. Standard theories attribute this variation to within-industry quality specialization. This paper argues that a significant portion of the export price variation is driven by rich and remote economies specializing in high-market power segments of industries. I also argue that this particular pattern of specialization (i) accounts for 30 percent of the overall gains from trade, and (ii) explains more than 37 percent of the observed cross-national income inequality
A Search for Optical Emission from Binary Black Hole Merger GW170814 with the Dark Energy Camera
Get PDFBinary black hole (BBH) mergers found by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo detectors are of immense scientific interest to the astrophysics community, but are considered unlikely to be sources of electromagnetic emission. To test whether they have rapidly fading optical counterparts, we used the Dark Energy Camera to perform an i-band search for the BBH merger GW170814, the first gravitational wave (GW) detected by three interferometers. The 87 deg localization region (at 90% confidence) centered in the Dark Energy Survey (DES) footprint enabled us to image 86% of the probable sky area to a depth of ~ 23 mag and provide the most comprehensive data set to search for electromagnetic (EM) emission from BBH mergers. To identify candidates, we perform difference imaging with our search images and with templates from pre-existing Dark Energy Survey (DES) images. The analysis strategy and selection requirements were designed to remove supernovae and to identify transients that decline in the first two epochs. We find two candidates, each of which is spatially coincident with a star or a high-redshift galaxy in the DES catalogs, and they are thus unlikely to be associated with GW170814. Our search finds no candidates associated with GW170814, disfavoring rapidly declining optical emission from BBH mergers brighter than ~ 23 mag ( ~ 5 × 10 erg s) 1–2 days after coalescence. In terms of GW sky map coverage, this is the most complete search for optical counterparts to BBH mergers to date
Regional Widening of Tropical Overturning: Forced Change, Natural Variability, and Recent Trends
Get PDFThe width of the tropical Hadley circulation (HC) has garnered intense interest in recent decades, owing to the emerging evidence for its expansion in observations and models and to the anticipated impacts on surface climate in its descending branches. To better clarify the causes and impacts of tropical widening, this work generalizes the zonal mean HC to the regional level by defining meridional overturning cells (RC) using the horizontally divergent wind. The edges of the RC are more closely connected to surface hydroclimate than more traditional metrics of regional tropical width (such as the sea level pressure ridge) or even than the zonal mean HC. Simulations reveal a robust weakening of the RC in response to greenhouse gas increases, along with a widening of the RC in some regions. For example, simulated widening of the zonal mean HC in the Southern Hemisphere appears to arise in large part from regional overturning anomalies over the Eastern Pacific, where there is no clear RC. Unforced interannual variability in the position of the zonal mean HC edge is associated with a more general regional widening. These distinct regional signatures suggest that the RCs may be well suited for the attribution of observed circulation trends. The spatial pattern of regional meridional overturning trends in reanalyses corresponds more closely to the pattern associated with unforced interannual variability than to the pattern associated with CO2 forcing, suggesting a large contribution of natural variability to the recent observed tropical widening trends