In a Global Economy, Trust is a Critical Commodity
In the global economy, corporate collaboration is becoming a necessity, making trust critical to the success of joint business ventures. A University of Missouri study examined the effects of trust at three distinct organizational levels and found that business executives should strive to build and maintain trust to improve performance. Building that trust may include consideration of staffing, special compensation and adjusted management processes.
“Firms form collaborative entities to generate value and achieve objectives that would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve independently,” said Lisa Scheer, the Emma S. Hibbs Distinguished Professor at MU’s Robert J. Trulaske, Sr. College of Business. “Collaborations often fail to reach those goals and the culprit may be poor relations and the lack of trust in joint ventures.”
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May 2, 2008 | Filed Under General | Leave a CommentNew Species Discovered in Brazil
Researchers discovered a legless lizard and a tiny woodpecker along with 12 other suspected new species in Brazil’s Cerrado, one of the world’s 34 biodiversity conservation hotspots.The Cerrado’s wooded grassland once covered an area half the size of Europe, but is now being converted to cropland and ranchland at twice the rate of the neighboring Amazon rainforest, resulting in the loss of native vegetation and unique species.
An expedition comprising scientists from Conservation International (CI) and Brazilian universities found 14 species believed new to science – eight fish, three reptiles, one amphibian, one mammal, and one bird – in and around the Serra Geral do Tocantins Ecological Station, a 716,000-hectare (1,769,274-acre) protected area that is the Cerrado’s second largest.
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April 30, 2008 | Filed Under Biology | Leave a CommentAbsinthe Uncorked
A new study may end the century-old controversy over what ingredient in absinthe caused the exotic green aperitif’s supposed mind-altering effects and toxic side-effects when consumed to excess. In the most comprehensive analysis of old bottles of original absinthe — once quaffed by the likes of van Gogh, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso to enhance their creativity — a team of scientists from Europe and the United States have concluded the culprit was plain and simple:
A high alcohol content, rather than thujone, the compound widely believed responsible for absinthe’s effects. Although consumed diluted with water, absinthe contained about 70 percent alcohol, giving it a 140-proof wallop. Most gin, vodka, and whiskey are 80 – 100-proof and contain 40-50 percent alcohol or ethanol.
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April 30, 2008 | Filed Under Chemistry | Leave a CommentBison Can Thrive Again
Bison can repopulate large areas from Alaska to Mexico over the next 100 years provided a series of conservation and restoration measures are taken, according to continental assessment of this iconic species by the Wildlife Conservation Society and other groups. The assessment was authored by a diverse group of conservationists, scientists, ranchers, and Native Americans/First Nations peoples, and appears in the April issue of the journal Conservation Biology.
The authors say that ecological restoration of bison, a keystone species in American natural history, could occur where conservationists and others see potential for large, unfettered landscapes over the next century. The general sites identified in the paper range from grasslands and prairies in the southwestern U.S., to Arctic lowland taiga in Alaska where the sub-species wood bison could once again roam. Large swaths of mountain forests and grasslands are identified as prime locations across Canada and the U.S., while parts of the desert in Mexico could also again support herds that once lived there.
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April 30, 2008 | Filed Under Biology | Leave a CommentWhat Is Happiness?
Some argue that happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have. This maxim sounds reasonable enough, but can it be tested, and if so, is it true?
It turns out it can be tested. Texas Tech University psychologist Jeff Larsen and Amie McKibban of Wichita State University asked undergraduates to indicate whether they possessed 52 different material items, such as a car, a stereo or a bed.
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April 29, 2008 | Filed Under Humans | Leave a CommentDecision Making, Is It All Me, Me, Me?
People act in their own best interests, according to traditional views of how and why we make the decisions that we do.
However, psychologists at the Universities of Leicester and Exeter have recently found evidence that this assumption is not necessarily true. In fact the research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, shows that most of us will act in the best interest of our team – often at our own expense.
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April 29, 2008 | Filed Under Humans | Leave a CommentHow Diagnostic Errors Happen
How frequently do doctors misdiagnose patients? While research has demonstrated that the great majority of medical diagnoses are correct, the answer is probably higher than patients expect and certainly higher than doctors realize. In a Supplement to the May issue of The American Journal of Medicine, a collection of articles and commentaries sheds light on the causes underlying misdiagnoses and demonstrates a nontrivial rate of diagnostic error that ranges from <5% in the perceptual specialties (pathology, radiology, dermatology) up to 10% to 15% in many other fields.
The sensitive issue of diagnostic error is rarely discussed and has been understudied. The papers in this volume confirm the extent of diagnostic errors and suggest improvement will best come by developing systems to provide physicians with better feedback on their own errors.
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April 29, 2008 | Filed Under Medical | Leave a CommentHigh Self-Esteem is Not Always What it’s Cracked Up to Be
Oscar Levant, a mid-century pianist, film star and wit, once watched noted keyboardist and composer George Gershwin spend an evening playing his own music at a party and clearly having a great time.“Tell me, George,” Levant said, somewhat jealously, “if you have it to do all over again would you still fall in love with yourself””
Increasingly, psychologists are looking at such behavior and saying out loud what may go against the grain of how many people act: high self-esteem is not the same thing as healthy self-esteem. And new research by a psychology professor from the University of Georgia is adding another twist: those with “secure” high self-esteem are less likely to be verbally defensive than those who have “fragile” high self-esteem.
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April 29, 2008 | Filed Under Humans | Leave a CommentNew Ancient Antarctic Sediment Reveals Climate Change History
Recent additions to the premier collection of Southern Ocean sediment cores at Florida State University’s Antarctic Marine Geology Research Facility will give international scientists a close-up look at fluctuations that occurred in Antarctica’s ice sheet and marine and terrestrial life as the climate cooled considerably between 20 and 14 million years ago.
FSU’s latest Antarctic sediment core acquisition was extracted from deep beneath the sea floor of Antarctica’s western Ross Sea, the Earth’s largest floating ice body. The new samples — segments of a drill core that measures more than 1,100 meters in length — offer an extraordinary stratigraphic record of sedimentary rock from the Antarctic continental margin that documents key developments in the area’s Cenozoic climatic and glacial history.
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April 29, 2008 | Filed Under Geology | Leave a CommentEmissions Irrelevant to Future Climate Change?
Climate change and the carbon emissions seem inextricably linked. However, new research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Carbon Balance and Management suggests that this may not always hold true, although it may be some time before we reach this saturation point.
The land and the oceans contain significantly more carbon than the atmosphere, and exchange carbon dioxide with the atmosphere. The amount of CO2 emissions absorbed by the land or the oceans vary in response to changes in climate (including natural variations such as El Nino or volcanic eruptions). So current theories suggest that climate change will have a feedback effect on the rate that atmospheric CO2 increases; rising CO2 levels in turn add to global warming.
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April 28, 2008 | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment
