KAUFMAN, Texas (AP) ? A central Texas prosecutor and his wife were found killed in their house two months after one of his assistants was gunned down near their office, authorities said.
Investigators found the bodies of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, Cynthia, on Saturday, Kaufman County sheriff's Lt. Justin Lewis said. Police, FBI agents, Texas Rangers and deputies were part of the investigation.
Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse was shot to death in a parking lot a block from his office on Jan. 31. No arrests have been made in his death.
Lewis declined to say how the couple died or whether authorities believe their deaths are linked to Hasse's. He wouldn't provide further details. Kaufman County is 33 miles southeast of Dallas.
Kaufman Police Chief Chris Aulbaugh told The Dallas Morning News that the McLellands had been shot in their home and although investigators didn't know if their deaths were related to Hasse's killing, they couldn't discount it.
"It is a shock," Aulbaugh told the newspaper. "It was a shock with Mark Hasse, and now you can just imagine the double shock and until we know what happened, I really can't confirm that it's related but you always have to assume until it's proven otherwise."
Sam Rosander, who lives in the same unincorporated area of Kaufman County as the McLellands, told The Associated Press on Saturday that sheriff's deputies were parked in the district attorney's driveway for about a month after Hasse was killed.
Aulbaugh said recently that the FBI was checking to see if Hasse's killing could be related to the March 19 killing of Colorado Department of Corrections head Tom Clements, who was gunned down after answering the doorbell at his home.
Evan Spencer Ebel, a former Colorado inmate and white supremacist who authorities believe killed Clements and a pizza deliveryman two days earlier, was killed in a March 21 shootout with Texas deputies about 100 miles from Kaufman.
Hasse was chief of the organized crime unit when he was an assistant prosecutor in Dallas County in the 1980s, and he handled similar cases in Kaufman County. After Hasse was killed, McLelland had said Hasse was one of 12 attorneys on his staff, all of whom handle hundreds of cases at a time.
"Anything anybody can think of, we're looking through," McLelland said after Hasse's death.
McLelland graduated from the University of Texas before a 23-year career in the Army, according to the website for the district attorney's office. He later earned his law degree from the Texas Wesleyan School of Law.
He and his wife have two daughters and three sons. One son is a police officer in Dallas.
Phil Ramone dies: A Grammy-award winning engineer and producer, Phil Ramone worked with some of the biggest names in the music business, including Frank Sinatra, Paul McCartney, Aretha Franklin, and Ray Charles.
By Hillel Italie,?Associated Press / March 30, 2013
Phil Ramone attends the 2008 National Arts Awards in New York. Ramone, the Grammy Award-winning engineer and producer whose platinum touch included recordings with Ray Charles, Billy Joel, and Paul Simon, has died.
(AP Photo/Evan Agostini)
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Phil Ramone, the Grammy Award-winning engineer and producer whose platinum touch included recordings with Ray Charles, Billy Joel and Paul Simon, has died at 72.
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Ramone's son, Matt Ramone, confirmed the death. The family did not immediately release details of the death, but Matt Ramone says his father was "very loving and will be missed."
Few producers had a more spectacular and diverse career. Ramone won 14 Grammy Awards. He worked with Frank Sinatra and Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney, Elton John and Tony Bennett.
He produced three records that went on to win Grammys for album of the year ? Simon's "Still Crazy After All These Years," Joel's "52nd Street" and Charles' "Genius Loves Company." He was a pioneer of digital recording who produced what is regarded as the first major commercial release on compact disc, "52nd Street," which came out on CD in 1982.
He thrived producing music for television, film and the stage. He won an Emmy for a TV special about Duke Ellington, a Grammy for the soundtrack to the Broadway musical "Promises, Promises" and a Grammy for the soundtrack to "Flashdance."
Ramone made an art out of the "Duets" concept, pairing Sinatra with Bono, Luther Vandross and other younger artists, Bennett with McCartney and Barbra Streisand, and Charles with Bonnie Raitt and Van Morrison. In Ramone's memoir, "Making Records," he recalled persuading a hesitant Sinatra to re-record some of his signature songs.
"I reminded Frank that while Laurence Olivier had performed Shakespeare in his 20s, the readings he did when he was in his 60s gave them new meaning," Ramone wrote. "I spoke with conviction. 'Don't my children ? and your grandchildren ? deserve to hear the way you're interpreting your classic songs now?'"
A native of South Africa, he seemed born to make music. He had learned violin by age 3 and was trained at The Julliard School in New York. Before age 20, he had opened his own recording studio.
Whoever is in charge of IT at a small business has a lot of things to worry about with a fairly limited budget and limited time to accomplish everything. Total Defense for Business offers small businesses an integrated cloud security platform that allows the administrator to handle endpoint security and Web and email filtering from a single management console. Endpoints have to be kept up-to-date with anti-malware tools, email threats need to be filtered out before the messages reach the user's inbox, and malicious?or inappropriate?sites need to be blocked. Total Defense for Business offers a fairly robust policy framework to handle all three different tasks to make the administrator's daily to-do-list easier to manage.
Total Defense for Business is a feature-packed cloud security platform where all the elements are tightly integrated. Total Defense offers anti-malware protection for endpoints, Web and email, such as detecting and removing malware on the endpoint, scanning emails and taking action when malware is detected, and blocking websites attempting to download malware. A robust rules engine allows administrators to create filtering policies and define granular application controls. I created email and Web policies to restrict file downloads, control what files could be uploaded or emailed (for data leak prevention), and prevent users from accessing certain sites and applications which violate corporate policy.
At first glance, Total Defense for Business reminded me a lot of GFI Cloud, a cloud security platform from GFI Software. GFI Cloud also provides antivirus protection (delivered via the company's VIPRE Antivirus engine)?for the endpoint, but its focus is primarily network management, not security. GFI Cloud offers asset management, health monitoring, and remote support. Total Defense for Business is focused on keeping emails clean, blocking malicious websites, and protecting the endpoint and is essentially a cloud-based unified threat management appliance. I use Sophos UTM as a virtual appliance, and Total Defense for Business felt very similar, except without having to source a server capable of running the virtual machine image.
Getting Started Small businesses are beginning to realize that cloud security services are cheaper and often easier to manage than on-premise hardware and software. Getting started with Total Defense is pretty simple, as all you really need is the domain's MX record and information about the Web proxy in order to direct all email and Web traffic through Total Defense's servers. There is no hardware to deploy or software to configure.?
I received the login credentials for my Total Defense account over email. Logging in, I saw the interface, with tabs for Dashboard, Filter Management, Quarantine, Archive, and Reports. Since this was my first time logging in, I was automatically directed to Filter Management where I could turn on Web and Email filtering. There are a lot of features packed into the platform, and Total Defense does a pretty good job of peppering the screens with relevant help text and links to the User Guide.
Total Defense for Business supports Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. There doesn't seem to be a way yet to apply the security policies to users on smartphones and tablets, just yet.
Total Defense sells through the channel, so businesses need to contact their local reseller or distributor to purchase an annual subscription for Total Defense for Business. The list price is $71.50 per user per year, for full Web, Email, and Endpoint functionality. While the price may seem pretty high at first, it's worth noting that the per-user license covers multiple devices. The company also offers a 15-day free trial for anyone wanting to try out the platform first. Customers can get support over the phone or open up a support ticket online.
Web Filtering To turn on Web filtering, Total Defense needs my public-facing IP address to recognize all the traffic with that IP address as being part of my network. The service can take up to 24 hours to accept and initialize the IP address, so I had to wait before configuring my Web proxy settings. I had the option to turn on user authentication with Web filtering, which means users have to log in to prove they are authorized to use the Total Defense platform.?Next: Web and Email Filtering, Endpoint Security with Total Defense
Lion kills heron: A video of four lions setting upon a blue heron at a Dutch zoo serves as a reminder of the King of the Jungle's wild instincts.
By Mai Ng?c Ch?u,?Contributor / March 28, 2013
A group of four lions, like the one pictured at left, and a heron, like the one at right, had an encounter at an Amsterdam zoo that did not turn out well for the heron.
Lion: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP/File; Heron: Robert Harbison / The Christian Science Monitor
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A video of four lions preying upon a heron at a Dutch zoo, shot last year and reposted on YouTube Wednesday, reminds us that you can take the lion out of the wild, but you can't take the wild out of the lion.?
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This Dutch family was visiting the zoo on a quiet Sunday afternoon when things got a bit more exciting than seeing bored animals lying around their enclosures. A lion spots a heron near the water. Following her instincts she sneaks up on it and manages to grab it. The whole family wants in on the prize, but a sneaky cub gets away with it.
In the video, a blue heron?at the Artis Royal Zoo wandered into a small pool while a group of four lions were basking in the sun, about 25 yards away. ?
As the the bird came into view of a lioness, instinct kicked in.?The lioness darted toward the bird, which desperately attempted to take flight but was pulled from the air with a leaping snatch.?The rest of her pride joined in to finish off the heron. ?
The footage of the killing has drawn thousands of views, because it's not often to see animals prey on one another at zoos. Experts said that, though the kings of the jungle are kept in captivity, cared and fed by humans, their original wildness remains untamed.?
Earlier this month, an African lion broke out of its pen and killed a 24-year-old intern at the Cat Haven sanctuary in California who was cleaning the main enclosure. According to CNN, the?5-year-old, 350-pound?killer was one of the victim's favorites.
Captive lions tend to act on their wild instincts whenever potential prey catches their eyes. A pair of videos titled "lion tries to eat baby" have attracted in total more than 7.6 millions views on YouTube since they were uploaded last April. The clips show an Oregon Zoo lioness snarling and baring her fangs in vain at a happily oblivious toddler protected by reinforced glass.
"Most of the time they seem relaxed and cuddly?so it's easy to forget that they react to meat with the reflexive instincts of a shark." Professor Craig Packer, a leading big cat expert at the University of Minnesota, noted in a recent interview with National Geographic News.?"Ten years ago Roy Horne (of Siegfried ?and Roy) was attacked by a tiger that they had handled for years?these attacks happen when people forget about the shark inside."
Early this month, The Monitor's Gloria Goodale interviewed Zara McDonald, executive director of the Bay Area Felidae?Conservation Fund?regarding the death of the Seattle woman.?
?Cats are predators,? said McDonald.?"I don?t care how tame anyone thinks one might be, they are always a wild animal with the ability to hurt humans.?
FILE - In this May 17, 2012 file photo, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. gestures during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington. Big business and major labor unions appeared ready Friday, March 29, 2013 to end a fight over a new low-skilled worker program that had threatened to upend negotiations on a sweeping immigration bill in the Senate providing a pathway to citizenship for 11 million immigrants already in the U.S. Schumer, who's been brokering talks between the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement that negotiators are "very close, closer than we have ever been, and we are very optimistic." He said there were still a few issues remaining. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
FILE - In this May 17, 2012 file photo, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. gestures during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington. Big business and major labor unions appeared ready Friday, March 29, 2013 to end a fight over a new low-skilled worker program that had threatened to upend negotiations on a sweeping immigration bill in the Senate providing a pathway to citizenship for 11 million immigrants already in the U.S. Schumer, who's been brokering talks between the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement that negotiators are "very close, closer than we have ever been, and we are very optimistic." He said there were still a few issues remaining. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
Several southwest Michigan pastors along with immigrant families and members of the general public take part in a pray-in for immigration reform event outside of Representative Fred Upton's office in downtown Kalamazoo on Friday, March 29, 2013. (AP Photo/Kalamazoo Gazette-MLive Media Group, Matt Gade ) ALL LOCAL TV OUT; LOCAL TV INTERNET OUT
Several southwest Michigan pastors along with immigrant families and members of the general public take part in a pray-in for immigration reform event outside of Representative Fred Upton's office in downtown Kalamazoo on Friday, March 29, 2013. (AP Photo/Kalamazoo Gazette-MLive Media Group, Matt Gade ) ALL LOCAL TV OUT; LOCAL TV INTERNET OUT
WASHINGTON (AP) ? Prospects for a Senate deal on an ambitious rewrite of the nation's immigration laws improved markedly as business and labor appeared ready to set aside their differences over a new low-skilled worker program holding up the agreement.
The AFL-CIO and U.S. Chamber of Commerce had been fighting over wages for tens of thousands of low-skilled workers who would be brought in under the new program to fill jobs in construction, hotels and resorts, nursing homes and restaurants, and other industries. But on Friday, officials from both sides said there was basic agreement on the wage issue, and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said a final deal on the low-wage worker dispute was very close.
That likely would clear the way for Schumer and seven other senators in a bipartisan group to unveil legislation the week of April 8 to overhaul the U.S. immigration system ? strengthening the border, cracking down on employers, allowing in tens of thousands of new high- and low-skilled workers and providing a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants already in the country.
"We're feeling very optimistic on immigration: Aspiring Americans will receive the road map to citizenship they deserve and we can modernize 'future flow' without reducing wages for any local workers, regardless of what papers they carry," AFL-CIO spokesman Jeff Hauser said in a statement. "Future flow" refers to future arrivals of legal immigrants.
Under the emerging agreement between business and labor, a new "W'' visa program would bring tens of thousands of lower-skilled workers a year to the country. The program would be capped at 200,000 a year, but the number of visas would fluctuate, depending on unemployment rates, job openings, employer demand and data collected by a new federal bureau pushed by the labor movement as an objective monitor of the market.
The workers would be able to change jobs and could seek permanent residency. Under current temporary worker programs, personnel can't move from employer to employer and have no path to permanent U.S. residence and citizenship. And currently there's no good way for employers to bring many low-skilled workers to the U.S. An existing visa program for low-wage nonagricultural workers is capped at 66,000 per year and is supposed to apply only to seasonal or temporary jobs.
The Chamber of Commerce said workers would earn actual wages paid to American workers or the prevailing wages for the industry they're working in, whichever is higher. The Labor Department determines prevailing wage based on customary rates in specific localities, so that it varies from city to city.
There was also disagreement about how to deal with certain higher-skilled construction jobs, such as electricians and welders, and it appears those will be excluded from the deal, said Geoff Burr, vice president of federal affairs at Associated Builders and Contractors. Burr said his group opposes such an exclusion because, even though unemployment in the construction industry is high right now, at times when it is low there can be labor shortages in high-skilled trades, and contractors want to be able to bring in foreign workers. But unions pressed for the exclusion, Burr said.
The low-skilled worker issue had loomed for weeks as perhaps the toughest matter to settle in monthslong closed-door talks on immigration among the senators, including Republicans John McCain of Arizona and Marco Rubio of Florida. The issue helped sink the last major attempt at immigration overhaul in 2007, when the legislation foundered on the Senate floor after an amendment was added to end a temporary worker program after five years, threatening a key priority of the business community.
The amendment passed by just one vote, 49-48. President Barack Obama, a senator at the time, joined in the narrow majority voting to end the program after five years.
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The proliferation of sensor-studded cellphones could lead to a wealth of data with socially useful applications ? in urban planning, epidemiology, operations research and emergency preparedness, among other things. Of course, before being released to researchers, the data would have to be stripped of identifying information. But how hard could it be to protect the identity of one unnamed cellphone user in a data set of hundreds of thousands or even millions?
According to a paperappearing this week in Scientific Reports, harder than you might think. Researchers at MIT and the Universit? Catholique de Louvain, in Belgium, analyzed data on 1.5 million cellphone users in a small European country over a span of 15 months and found that just four points of reference, with fairly low spatial and temporal resolution, was enough to uniquely identify 95 percent of them.
In other words, to extract the complete location information for a single person from an "anonymized" data set of more than a million people, all you would need to do is place him or her within a couple of hundred yards of a cellphone transmitter, sometime over the course of an hour, four times in one year. A few Twitter posts would probably provide all the information you needed, if they contained specific information about the person's whereabouts.
The first author on the paper is Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, a graduate student in the research group of Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Science Sandy Pentland. He's joined by C?sar Hidalgo, an assistant professor of media arts and science; Vincent Blondel, a visiting professor at MIT and a professor of applied mathematics at Universit? Catholique; and Michel Verleysen, a professor of electrical engineering at Universit? Catholique.
Focusing the debate
Hidalgo's group specializes in applying the tools of statistical physics to a wide range of subjects, from communications networks to genetics to economics. In this case, he and de Montjoye were able to use those tools to uncover a simple mathematical relationship between the resolution of spatiotemporal data and the likelihood of identifying a member of a data set.
According to their formula, the probability of identifying someone goes down if the resolution of the measurements decreases, but less than you might think. Reporting the time of each measurement as imprecisely as sometime within a 15-hour span, or location as imprecisely as somewhere amid 15 adjacent cell towers, would still enable the unique identification of half the people in the sample data set.
But while its initial application may be discouraging, de Montjoye and Hidalgo hope that their formula will provide a way for researchers and policy analysts to reason more rigorously about the privacy safeguards that need to be put in place when they're working with aggregated location data.
"Both C?sar and I deeply believe that we all have a lot to gain from this data being used," de Montjoye says. "This formula is something that could be useful to help the debate and decide, OK, how do we balance things out, and how do we make it a fair deal for everyone to use this data?"
Everybody's different
In the data set that the researchers analyzed, the location of a cellphone was inferred solely from that of the cell tower it was connected to, and the time of the connection was given as falling within a one-hour interval. Each cellphone had a unique, randomly generated identifying number, so that its movement could be traced over time. But there was no information connecting that number to the phone's owner.
The researchers randomly selected a representative sampling from the set of 1.5 million cellphone traces and, for each trace, began choosing points at random. For 95 percent of the traces, just four randomly selected points was enough to distinguish them from all other traces in the database. In the worst (or, from another perspective, best) case, 11 measurements were necessary.
The researchers suspect that similar relationships might hold for other types of data. "I would not be surprised if a similar result ? maybe requiring more points ? would, for example, extend to web browsing," Hidalgo says. "The space of potential combinations is really large. When a person is, in some sense, being expressed in a space in which the total number of combinations is huge, the probability that two people would have the same exact trajectory ? whether it's walking or browsing ? is almost nil."
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice
Thanks to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for this article.
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Editor?s note: There?s a lot of interesting academic research going on in digital media ? but who has time to sift through all those journals and papers?
Our friends at Journalist?s Resource, that?s who. JR is a project of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and they spend their time examining the new academic literature in media, social science, and other fields, summarizing the high points and giving you a point of entry. Roughly once a month, JR managing editor John Wihbey will sum up for us what?s new and fresh.
This month?s edition of What?s New In Digital Scholarship rounds up the findings of eight studies that touch on many of the major themes scholars are exploring: how an era of social media and citizen media production are affecting journalistic norms and the business fundamentals and operations of journalism; how issues of participation and access are affecting citizens? experiences and roles in the information ecosystem; and, looking abroad, how digital technologies are being used and curtailed in various conflict and authoritarian situations. In addition, the potential uses and abuses of online data continue to be an area of focus for academics.
More academic research is documenting how ?hybrid? norms are evolving within legacy news media grappling with the participatory logic of digital culture, and how non-traditional organizations and NGOs are playing quasi-press roles as producers of watchdog-oriented media and conveners of public discussion. This paper looks at coverage of the 2011 Durban climate change conference and uses it to examine the new interplay between legacy and advocacy media. Because journalists could not produce nearly the sheer volume of media ? videos, pictures, blog posts, tweets, etc. ? that the NGOs could, traditional media had to draw on NGO materials and even point to their creation as significant news events in their own right. By the same token, NGOs sometimes operated as news organizations, soliciting comment from news makers and turning themselves into platforms for public participation and discussion.
?Unlike USA Today and the New York Times,? the author writes, ?NGO coverage was exhaustive and included the actions and comments of high-profile international and national officials, scientists, civil society, and locally focused grassroots groups. In fact the news flows from activist and social media outlets were so much more robust and dynamic than legacy journalism coverage that even the New York Times referred its readers to Twitter for ?the best way to track the finale and afterthoughts.?? Moreover, when NGO communications staff interview officials and delegates ?using questions from the public, or?enlist youth delegates to report on their country negotiator, these organizations are opening up the discourse, going beyond their own specific climate agenda or the agenda of climate justice movement leaders.?
The study examines the degree to which information available online can successfully predict an individual?s personal ? and private ? attributes. The researchers correlated public records of Facebook ?Likes? from more than 58,000 users with results from personality and intelligence tests and information from public profiles. The researchers were able to accurately predict a male user?s sexual orientation 88 percent of the time. While less than 5 percent of users were explicitly linked to gay policy or advocacy groups, ?predictions rely on less informative but more popular Likes, such as ?Britney Spears? or ?Desperate Housewives? (both moderately indicative of being gay).?
The model was able to predict a user?s ethnic origin (95 percent) and gender (93 percent) with a high degree of accuracy. ?Patterns of online behavior as expressed by Likes,? the researchers write, ?significantly differ between those groups, allowing for nearly perfect classification.? The model also predicted a user?s religion (82 percent), political views (85 percent), relationship status (67 percent) and substance use (between 65 percent and 75 percent for drugs, alcohol and cigarettes) with a high degree of accuracy. The researchers caution against the potential negative outcomes that ready access to this type of personal data might have: ?Commercial companies, governmental institutions, or even one?s Facebook friends could use software to infer attributes such as intelligence, sexual orientation or political views [that] could pose a threat to an individual?s well-being, freedom or even life.?
The study evaluates the broad set of practices that now commonly constitute audience engagement and pulls them together toward a new theory of the role of journalism in a digital society. The researcher examines how news audience members are becoming secondary ?gatekeepers,? helping to communicate their tastes to news outlets and decide what is best or most worthy in terms of content. Of course, this is partly accomplished not only through the now-ubiquitous ?most popular? displays (more broadly called ?usage boxes?), which reflect reader data, but also through comment management systems like Disqus and social media platforms that foster engagement and allow crowds to record their approval or disapproval. The researcher analyzed the practices of websites of 138 newspapers during a two-month stretch in 2011.
Her sweeping conclusion is that ?journalists who long have defined themselves largely as society?s gatekeepers now find the role is broadly shared with members of an increasingly active audience. Users are choosing news not only for their own consumption but also for the consumption of others, including those within their personal circle of acquaintances and those who are part of an undifferentiated online public. This shift toward ?user-generated visibility? suggests a new way of looking at one of the oldest conceptualizations of the journalist?s role in our society.? Finally, there?s a great historical nugget in the study to put all this in context: ?Not since 18th century newspapers left their fourth page blank so that people could add their own observations for the benefit of subsequent readers?have news consumers had this sort of power to make editorial judgments not only for themselves but also for others ? and, importantly, to act on those judgments by serving as secondary distributors of the material they deem worthy.?
This study falls somewhere in the ?Is Google Making Us Stupid?? category, though its findings are nuanced. The public has a woeful understanding of many public policy issues ??that much we know. And though much depends on whether local or national topics are at issue, in general people of higher socioeconomic status have tended to acquire knowledge more rapidly in the mass media age. But how do the ways people access information ? particularly, traditional versus online media channels ? affect what they learn about policy topics? Are people learning more because of online access?
The tentative answer is no. This new study analyzes Pew Research Center data on news consumption to assess how modes of access and socioeconomic status aid political learning about issues. The researcher concludes that ?affluent and educated groups are more active in seeking news from various channels and taking advantage of new technology to get the news.? Overall, however, the study?s ?analysis indicates that online news use has not yet contributed substantially to political learning,? contradicting some previous research about the perceived benefits of nearly ubiquitous online news and information. The study speculates that this may be because ?online news is highly individualized and tailored to personal preferences, which limit its ability to inform about a broad range of issues relevant to the larger society.? However, the data used were a little old (2006) and the respondents to the Pew survey skewed older (average age 50.)
Twitter commands all the attention from U.S. media watchers and social media researchers, but the dynamics on China?s Sina Weibo microblogging platform are in many respects more interesting, as it features a 24/7 massive cat-and-mouse game between censors and dissidents. This study set out to establish the precise speed and comprehensiveness of the Chinese social media censorship regime, which is comprised of both software bots and human minders (in 2012, Sina Weibo also began offering ?user credits? for those who report on fellow users). The researchers monitored more than 3,000 users who often get into trouble to see what the censorship response rate was.
The researchers found that ?especially for original posts that are not reposts, most deletions occur within 5-30 minutes, accounting for 25% of the total deletions of such posts. Nearly 90% of the deletions of such posts happen within the first 24 hours of the post.? Other interesting and weird aspects of China?s censorship apparatus include: If you use the word ?Falun,? as in the religious group ?Falun Gong,? you are likely to be told that there is a delay in posting the material due to ?server data synchronization? problems; this gives human censors the time to evaluate the content and zap it if need be. Further, the censors have a way of fooling users by ?camouflaging? the deletion: ?Weibo also sometimes makes it appear to a user that their post was successfully posted, but other users are not able to see the post. The poster receives no warning message in this case.?
Part of the expanding academic literature on the Arab uprising and the role of digital media, the study casts doubt on the view that the Internet ?caused? these events. But the researchers do ?contend that the complex interactions between communication platforms (social media), communication phenomena (narrative and social bonding), and collective identity (civil religion) are a salient feature of the revolutions.? Most importantly, though, the online narratives that formed around Egypt?s Khaled Saeed and Tunisia?s Mohamed Bouazizi fit squarely into pre-existing Islamic frames of martyrdom.
So the ?reason? for viral online campaigns around these two figures and their stories ? state brutality in the case of Saeed, and politically motivated suicide for Bouazizi ? is that the power of the digital networks met up with a well-primed social-cultural pathway, the authors suggest: ?There must be conditions in place that create a context in which certain narratives can resonate and serve as the foundation for an imagined solidarity and imagined politics of hope and change. We contend that greater understandings of the narrative landscapes before and after the Arab Spring can shed light on possible tipping points and that our analysis has elucidated two cases where the combination of a moment of crisis, vertical integration (of a longstanding cultural narrative, contemporary narrativized events and personal investments, however, small), civil religion, and social media, yielded a mediated politics of hope for the citizens of Tunisia and Egypt.?
Based on survey of more than 1,400 Swedish journalists, the study divides up media members into three groups with respect to social media participation: skeptical shunners, pragmatic conformists, and enthusiastic activists. It?s a division that would be familiar to American newsroom professionals. But what?s most interesting is how little the ?enthusiasts? see their core values changing: ?With regard to traditional professional ideals (objectivity, scrutiny, neutrality, independence, and so on) our study, however, shows no significant differences between [social media] users and non-users. This suggests that social media are indeed changing the journalistic profession in terms of how it relates to the audience/public, but not in terms of how it perceives its fundamental societal role as the fourth estate.?
Likely you?ve already heard much about this ? and the Lab has a valuable interview with the report?s lead author. In any case, key findings include: As news outlets have slashed staff and reduced the quantity and quality of coverage, the report suggests, many consumers have responded negatively: ?Nearly one-third ? 31% ? of people say they have deserted a particular news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to, according to [a] survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults in early 2013.? About half of all people surveyed said news stories are not as thorough as they were previously. Of the consumers who reported abandoning certain news outlets, 61 percent said the decision was based on issues of quality, while 24 percent said there were not enough stories. Newspaper ad revenue is now down 60 percent compared to a decade ago. The number of U.S. news jobs is likely now below 40,000, compared to the historic high of 56,900 in 1989, a 30 percent decrease overall.
Amid the gloom, bright spots include: ?In 2012, total [online] traffic to the top 25 news sites increased 7.2%, according to comScore. And according to Pew Research data, 39% of respondents got news online or from a mobile device ?yesterday,? up from 34% in 2010, when the survey was last conducted.? Further, the emerging mobile market offers another opportunity, as many people appear to be consuming more news because of Internet-enabled devices. This offers opportunities for the news business: ?One piece of [the mobile] market that news can exploit is sponsorship advertising, and in 2012, so-called native advertising (a type of sponsorship ad) made headlines. Though it remains small in dollars, the category?s growth rate is second only to that of video: sponsorship ads rose 38.9%, to $1.56 billion; that followed a jump of 56.1% in 2011. Traditional publications such as The Atlantic and Forbes, as well as digital publications BuzzFeed and Gawker, have relied heavily on native ads to quickly build digital ad revenues, and their use is expected to spread.?
Photo by Anna Creech used under a Creative Commons license.
Mar. 28, 2013 ? Marital conflict is a significant source of environmental stress for children, and witnessing such conflict may harm children's stress response systems which, in turn, may affect their mental and intellectual development.
These conclusions come from a new study by researchers at Auburn University and the Catholic University of America. The study appears in the journal Child Development.
Researchers looked at 251 children from a variety of backgrounds who lived in two-parent homes. The children reported on their exposure to marital conflict when they were 8, providing information on the frequency, intensity, and lack of resolution of conflicts between their parents. The study gauged how children's stress response system functioned by measuring respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), an index of activity in the parasympathetic branch of the body's stress response system. RSA has been linked to the ability to regulate attention and emotion. Children's ability to rapidly solve problems and quickly see patterns in new information also was measured at ages 8, 9, and 10.
Children who witnessed more marital conflict at age 8 showed less adaptive RSA reactivity at 9, but this was true only for children who had lower resting RSA. In addition, children with lower baseline RSA whose stress response systems were also less adaptive developed mental and intellectual ability more slowly.
"The findings provide further evidence that stress affects the development of the body's stress response systems that help regulate attention, and that how these systems work is tied to the development of cognitive ability," explains J. Benjamin Hinnant, assistant professor of psychology at the Catholic University of America and one of the researchers.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Society for Research in Child Development, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
J. Benjamin Hinnant, Mona El-Sheikh, Margaret Keiley, Joseph A. Buckhalt. Marital Conflict, Allostatic Load, and the Development of Children's Fluid Cognitive Performance. Child Development, 2013; DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12103
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Will Vandevanter, of Help Net Security, made a rather disturbing discovery: thousands of Amazon S3 data "buckets" were improperly configured and left exposed to prying eyes. Vandevanter started his probe by generating URLs using the names of major companies and sites that use Amazon's cloud storage service. In the end he uncovered 12,328 of the so-called buckets -- 1,951 of which were visible to the public. Those folders were home to some 126 billion files that contain everything from personal data hosted by a social networking service, sales records, video game source code and even unencrypted backups of databases. By default, S3 accounts are set to private, which means these stores of potentially sensitive data had to be flipped to public manually -- most likely by accident. Amazon has responded to the discovery by alerting users who might have inadvertently made their files publicly accessible. If you've got an S3 account of your own, now would be an excellent time to double check your own settings. And if you're looking for more details of Vandevanter's research, hit up the source link.
The great recession, Facebook?s (NASDAQ:FB) troubled IPO, JPMorgan?s (NYSE:JPM) London Whale trading losses, and HSBC?s (NYSE:HBC) Libor scandal -- these significant events have caused severe public distrust of Wall Street.
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The problem is even more apparent among the younger generation. These days, millennials either avoid investing altogether, or invest with great caution. According to a study conducted by Accenture Wealth and Asset Management Services, 43% of respondents between ages 21 and 30 say they are conservative investors, compared with only 31% of baby boomers, Fox Business reports.
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Perhaps that?s why millennials are looking more toward ETFs as investment vehicles, given their reputations for providing less volatility and greater diversity and flexibility.
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?I think the young demographic has essentially grown up with ETFs. [After all,] the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (NYSEARCA:SPY), the first ETF out there, just celebrated its 20th anniversary [in January], and ETFs have increased exponentially in terms of assets since,? Alex Teyf, senior manager of mutual funds and ETF products, tells Minyanvile. ?So [the young] are more familiar with them.?
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Based on recent client data, TD Ameritrade (NYSE:AMTD) found that there was a strong correlation between age and the ownership of ETFs, with those aged 26 to 35 holding 12.7% of their assets in ETFs. In contrast, 66- to 75-year-olds held only 6.2% of assets in ETFs.
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Young people are also more likely than any other age group to hold international ETFs, which Teyf says is also due to their greater comfort and familiarity with ETFs in general.
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?If they?re comfortable holding an ETF on the S&P 500 (INDEXSP:.INX), for example, then they will look for comparable exposure to an international market and many of the ETFs that have come online over the past few years are targeting specific foreign or global indexes,? Teyf elaborates.
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For risk-averse young investors, ETFs are also a way to get exposure to stocks like Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) at relatively low prices.
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?ETFs are an efficient way of gaining access to some of the better picks in an index,? Teyf explains. ?If you want to get access to technology stocks like Apple, and you don?t want to put all your eggs in one basket and you only have $700 to invest, ETFs are a more effective way of investing the technology sector without taking all the risk to just buy that one symbol.?
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For millennials who are keen to dip their toes into the world of investing, Teyf has a few tips. ?Not all ETFs are created equally -- you really should understand what makes up the holdings of an ETF. And be aware of those metrics that matter when you?re talking about ETFs, which are volume and liquidity, assets under management, spread and tracking error.?
Twitter:?@sterlingwong
No positions in stocks mentioned.
The information on this website solely reflects the analysis of or opinion about the performance of securities and financial markets by the writers whose articles appear on the site. The views expressed by the writers are not necessarily the views of Minyanville Media, Inc. or members of its management. Nothing contained on the website is intended to constitute a recommendation or advice addressed to an individual investor or category of investors to purchase, sell or hold any security, or to take any action with respect to the prospective movement of the securities markets or to solicit the purchase or sale of any security. Any investment decisions must be made by the reader either individually or in consultation with his or her investment professional. Minyanville writers and staff may trade or hold positions in securities that are discussed in articles appearing on the website. Writers of articles are required to disclose whether they have a position in any stock or fund discussed in an article, but are not permitted to disclose the size or direction of the position. Nothing on this website is intended to solicit business of any kind for a writer's business or fund. Minyanville management and staff as well as contributing writers will not respond to emails or other communications requesting investment advice.
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NICOSIA (Reuters) - Cyprus is expected to stop people taking their money out of the country but will not restrict dealings at home as it tries to avert a run on its banks after agreeing a tough rescue package with international lenders.
Cypriots have taken to the streets of Nicosia in their thousands to protest against a bailout deal that will push their country into an economic slump and cost many their jobs.
European leaders said the deal averted a chaotic national bankruptcy that might have forced Cyprus out of the euro.
With banks due to reopen on Thursday after nearly two weeks, Finance Minister Michael Sarris said capital controls will be "within the realms of reason" and a business leader said he had been told they would affect only international transactions.
"We will look at the best way to limit the possibility of large sums of money leaving, and not imposing punitive conditions on the economy, businesses and individuals," Sarris told local television.
Speaking after meeting government officials, the head of the Cyprus chamber of commerce said: "We have been assured that limitations will not affect transactions within Cyprus at all."
"Where there will be limitations is on what we spend abroad and also on capital outflows," Phidias Pelides told reporters.
The central bank governor said earlier that "loose" controls would apply temporarily to all banks. Earlier, the finance minister said they could be in place for weeks. Banks have been shut since final bailout talks got under way in mid-March.
Russia, whose citizens have billions of euros in Cyprus and use Cypriot banks to move money around even among Russian firms, cautioned Nicosia against imposing onerous controls on healthy banks and noted that Moscow was reviewing loan terms to Cyprus.
"If there are such measures, this will not foster trust but only provoke additional problems for participants, depositors," Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on Tuesday.
He cautioned that Russian willingness to restructure and extend a 2.5-billion euro loan made to Cyprus in 2011 would depend on the island's decision on capital controls.
"We will discuss (restructuring of the loan) in the context of the decisions the parliament adopts," he said. "We are prepared to discuss within these parameters."
State-controlled Russian bank VTB has a subsidiary in Cyprus, Russian Commercial Bank, which has not been directly affected by a bailout deal which focuses on big local banks that lost badly in the restructuring of debts in neighboring Greece.
POPULAR ANGER
The terms of the 10-billion euro ($13-billion) rescue from the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank have stirred popular anger within Cyprus at the country's partners in the EU, notably Germany, the bloc's main paymaster and fiercest advocate of austerity.
On Tuesday, many hundreds of high school students protested at parliament, in the first major expression of popular anger since the bailout was agreed in the early hours of Monday in Brussels. The deal largely side-stepped the Cypriot parliament, and has triggered opposition calls for a referendum.
"They've just got rid of all our dreams," said one student, named Thomas.
Outside the central bank on Tuesday, about 200 employees of the country's biggest commercial lender, the Bank of Cyprus, demanded the resignation of central bank governor Panicos Demetriades, chanting "Hands off Cyprus" and "Disgrace".
Dimos Dimosthenous, a veteran Bank of Cyprus employee, said: "The bank is being driven to closure. That will be the end."
A Bank of Cyprus official said its chief executive, Yiannis Kypri, had been removed on the orders of the central bank.
It follows the appointment of a special administrator to run the bank, which is being restructured as part of the bailout deal, and an offer to resign by its chairman, Andreas Artemis.
ACCOUNTS FROZEN
The second largest lender, Cyprus Popular Bank, also known as Laiki, is to be shut down, and accounts of under 100,000 euros and some loans will be moved to the Bank of Cyprus. Deposits at both banks over the 100,000-euro mark, which is an EU benchmark for state insurance, will be frozen.
Government officials have estimated that these larger depositors, many of them wealthy foreigners including Russians, could lose around 40 percent of their cash.
On Wednesday, the government was appointing special crisis teams of economic experts to advise ministers.
Many Cypriots say they do not feel reassured by the bailout deal, however, and are expected to besiege banks as soon as they reopen after a shutdown that began over a week ago.
The long closure of the banks has hurt business, according to Andreas Hadjiadamou, president of the Cyprus Supermarkets Association, who said consumer confidence had "hit the floor".
Maria Benaki, who runs a family silverware business on Nicosia's biggest shopping street, said she had not had a customer in days.
"The situation is dire," she said. "What will happen at the end of the month when I need to pay my bills?"
(Additional reporting by Agnieszka Flak in Durban, Douglas Busvine and Steve Gutterman in Moscow and Laura Noonan and Karolina Tagaris in Nicosia; Writing by Giles Elgood and Matt Robinson; Editing by Will Waterman and Alastair Macdonald)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Tuesday chose veteran agent Julia Pierson as Secret Service director, the first woman to lead the male-dominated agency, a year after its reputation was tarnished by a scandal involving agents and prostitutes in Colombia.
Pierson will replace Mark Sullivan, who retired in February and was in charge during the Colombia scandal - one of the worst in the agency's history.
The Secret Service has been criticized for having an insular, male-dominated culture, and Pierson's appointment also comes as Obama fends off criticism that his second-term picks for high-level posts have not included enough women and minority candidates.
Pierson, a native of Florida, is currently chief of staff at the Secret Service and began her career as a special agent with the Miami field office in 1983. The director's position does not require confirmation by the U.S. Senate.
"Julia is eminently qualified to lead the agency that not only safeguards Americans at major events and secures our financial system, but also protects our leaders and our first families, including my own," Obama said in a statement.
Starting in 1988, Pierson served four years with the Presidential Protective Division, and she became deputy assistant director of the Office of Protective Operations in 2005.
The Secret Service has been trying to rebuild its image after the April 2012 scandal when agency employees in Cartagena ahead of a visit by Obama took prostitutes to their hotel rooms.
It led to an official investigation that concluded that the president's safety had not been compromised, but the scandal was a big embarrassment for the agency.
A dozen Secret Service employees were accused of misconduct, and at least seven of them have left the agency.
Sullivan apologized to Congress last year for the episode, which he said reflected poor decisions by agents and was not representative of the agency's culture. A new code of conduct was implemented banning alcohol use within 10 hours of duty and patronizing "non-reputable" establishments.
"During the Colombia prostitution scandal, the Secret Service lost the trust of many Americans, and failed to live up to the high expectations placed on it," Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said on Tuesday.
"Ms. Pierson has a lot of work ahead of her to create a culture that respects the important job the agency is tasked with. I hope she succeeds in restoring lost credibility in the Secret Service."
In a statement Tuesday, Sullivan said Pierson would excel in the role. "I have known and worked with Julie for close to 30 years," Sullivan said about his successor. "This is a historic and exciting time for the Secret Service and I know Julie will do an outstanding job."
Pierson also received accolades from a key Democrat in Congress. Her appointment "is welcome news and a proud milestone," Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Tom Carper said in a statement.
Secret Service agents who know Pierson describe her as smart, experienced and even-keeled.
"Julie was selected because she is competent, and she has been around for 30 years and understands the service well," Ralph Basham, a former Secret Service director, told Reuters.
"It's exciting for the Secret Service. It's exciting to have a female named to that position. My daughter was a Secret Service agent, so it makes me very proud of the organization and proud of Julie for attaining that position," he said.
Law enforcement experts point out that Pierson will not be an anomaly in the broader federal law enforcement community - the heads of the Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Marshals Service are women.
SPECULATION OVER FORMER OFFICIAL
Sources had told Reuters earlier this month that Obama had chosen retired Secret Service official David O'Connor to head the agency. Former law enforcement agents said they had heard he had withdrawn his name, but that was not officially confirmed and O'Connor did not respond to several attempts to reach him.
The National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, or NOBLE, had written to the White House in opposition to O'Connor.
O'Connor's name had cropped up in a long-running racial discrimination lawsuit after one email that used racially charged language was sent to him, but his attorney said he did not distribute it further.
Ronald Kessler, who has written a book about the Secret Service, said black agents applied pressure that went all the way up to Obama to torpedo O'Connor's appointment.
"My understanding is that Dave decided for personal reasons that he would withdraw his name," former Secret Service director Basham said. "I understand that it was he who decided to remove his name from consideration for the position."
(Additional reporting by Jeff Mason and Deborah Charles; Editing by Christopher Wilson and Cynthia Osterman)
Women make better decisions than menPublic release date: 25-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Julia Thomson thomsoj@mcmaster.ca 905-525-9140 x24871 McMaster University
Hamilton, ON, March 25, 2013 Women's abilities to make fair decisions when competing interests are at stake make them better corporate leaders, researchers have found.
A survey of more than 600 board directors showed that women are more likely to consider the rights of others and to take a cooperative approach to decision-making. This approach translates into better performance for their companies.
The study, which was published this week in the International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, was conducted by Chris Bart, professor of strategic management at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, and Gregory McQueen, a McMaster graduate and senior executive associate dean at A.T. Still University's School of Osteopathic Medicine in Arizona.
"We've known for some time that companies that have more women on their boards have better results," explains Bart. "Our findings show that having women on the board is no longer just the right thing but also the smart thing to do. Companies with few female directors may actually be shortchanging their investors."
Bart and McQueen found that male directors, who made up 75% of the survey sample, prefer to make decisions using rules, regulations and traditional ways of doing business or getting along. Female directors, in contrast, are less constrained by these parameters and are more prepared to rock the boat than their male counterparts.
In addition, women corporate directors are significantly more inclined to make decisions by taking the interests of multiple stakeholders into account in order to arrive at a fair and moral decision. They will also tend to use cooperation, collaboration and consensus building more often and more effectively in order to make sound decisions.
"Women seem to be predisposed to be more inquisitive and to see more possible solutions. At the board level where directors are compelled to act in the best interest of the corporation while taking the viewpoints of multiple stakeholders into account, this quality makes them more effective corporate directors," explains McQueen.
Globally, women make up approximately 9% of corporate board memberships. Arguments for gender equality, quotas and legislation have done little to increase female representation in the boardroom, despite evidence showing that their presence has been linked to better organizational performance, higher rates of return, more effective risk management and even lower rates of bankruptcy. Bart's and McQueen's finding that women's decision-making ability makes them more effective than their male counterparts gives boards a method to deal with the many issues and concerns currently confronting corporations.
###
McMaster University, one of four Canadian universities listed among the Top 100 universities in the world, is renowned for its innovation in both learning and discovery. It has a student population of 23,000, and more than 156,000 alumni in 140 countries.
Established in 1892 by A.T. Still, MD, DO, the founder of osteopathy, A.T. Still University began as the nation's first college of osteopathic medicine and has evolved into a leading university of health sciences comprised of one college and four schools on two campuses and online. Today it offers master's degrees across allied health disciplines; doctorates in health education, physical therapy, health sciences, and audiology; the doctor of dental medicine; and the doctor of osteopathic medicine.
The International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics is available at http://www.inderscience.com/jhome.php?jcode=ijbge.
How do people make decisions?
Personal interest reasoning: The decision maker is motivated by ego, selfishness and the desire to avoid trouble. This method is most often exhibited by young children who largely tend to be motivated by to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
Normative reasoning: The decision maker tries to avoid "rocking the boat" by adhering to rules, laws or norms. Stereotypical examples of groups that use this form of reasoning include organizations with strong established cultures like Mary Kay or the US Marines.
Complex moral reasoning: The decision maker acknowledges and considers the rights of others in the pursuit of fairness by using a social cooperation and consensus building approach that is consistently applied in a non-arbitrary fashion.
Why should boards have more female directors?
Boards with high female representation experience a 53% higher return on equity, a 66% higher return on invested capital and a 42% higher return on sales (Joy et al., 2007).
Having just one female director on the board cuts the risk of bankruptcy by 20% (Wilson, 2009).
When women directors are appointed, boards adopt new governance practices earlier, such as director training, board evaluations, director succession planning structures (Singh and Vinnicombe, 2002)
Women make other board members more civilized and sensitive to other perspectives (Fondas and Sassalos, 2000) and reduce 'game playing' (Singh, 2008)
Female directors are more likely to ask questions rather than nodding through decisions (Konrad et al., 2008).
Television Editors Live interviews with Chris Bart can be arranged using the
DeGroote School of Business's broadcast studio. Call Julia Thomson 905-525-9140
ext. 24871 to schedule airtime and book a live feed from campus.
Contact:
Chris Bart
Professor of Strategic Management
DeGroote School of Business
McMaster University
905-515-6399
bartck@mcmaster.ca
Julia Thomson
Manager of Marketing & Communications
DeGroote School of Business
McMaster University
905-525-9140 ext. 24871
thomsoj@mcmaster.ca
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Women make better decisions than menPublic release date: 25-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Julia Thomson thomsoj@mcmaster.ca 905-525-9140 x24871 McMaster University
Hamilton, ON, March 25, 2013 Women's abilities to make fair decisions when competing interests are at stake make them better corporate leaders, researchers have found.
A survey of more than 600 board directors showed that women are more likely to consider the rights of others and to take a cooperative approach to decision-making. This approach translates into better performance for their companies.
The study, which was published this week in the International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, was conducted by Chris Bart, professor of strategic management at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, and Gregory McQueen, a McMaster graduate and senior executive associate dean at A.T. Still University's School of Osteopathic Medicine in Arizona.
"We've known for some time that companies that have more women on their boards have better results," explains Bart. "Our findings show that having women on the board is no longer just the right thing but also the smart thing to do. Companies with few female directors may actually be shortchanging their investors."
Bart and McQueen found that male directors, who made up 75% of the survey sample, prefer to make decisions using rules, regulations and traditional ways of doing business or getting along. Female directors, in contrast, are less constrained by these parameters and are more prepared to rock the boat than their male counterparts.
In addition, women corporate directors are significantly more inclined to make decisions by taking the interests of multiple stakeholders into account in order to arrive at a fair and moral decision. They will also tend to use cooperation, collaboration and consensus building more often and more effectively in order to make sound decisions.
"Women seem to be predisposed to be more inquisitive and to see more possible solutions. At the board level where directors are compelled to act in the best interest of the corporation while taking the viewpoints of multiple stakeholders into account, this quality makes them more effective corporate directors," explains McQueen.
Globally, women make up approximately 9% of corporate board memberships. Arguments for gender equality, quotas and legislation have done little to increase female representation in the boardroom, despite evidence showing that their presence has been linked to better organizational performance, higher rates of return, more effective risk management and even lower rates of bankruptcy. Bart's and McQueen's finding that women's decision-making ability makes them more effective than their male counterparts gives boards a method to deal with the many issues and concerns currently confronting corporations.
###
McMaster University, one of four Canadian universities listed among the Top 100 universities in the world, is renowned for its innovation in both learning and discovery. It has a student population of 23,000, and more than 156,000 alumni in 140 countries.
Established in 1892 by A.T. Still, MD, DO, the founder of osteopathy, A.T. Still University began as the nation's first college of osteopathic medicine and has evolved into a leading university of health sciences comprised of one college and four schools on two campuses and online. Today it offers master's degrees across allied health disciplines; doctorates in health education, physical therapy, health sciences, and audiology; the doctor of dental medicine; and the doctor of osteopathic medicine.
The International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics is available at http://www.inderscience.com/jhome.php?jcode=ijbge.
How do people make decisions?
Personal interest reasoning: The decision maker is motivated by ego, selfishness and the desire to avoid trouble. This method is most often exhibited by young children who largely tend to be motivated by to seek pleasure and avoid pain.
Normative reasoning: The decision maker tries to avoid "rocking the boat" by adhering to rules, laws or norms. Stereotypical examples of groups that use this form of reasoning include organizations with strong established cultures like Mary Kay or the US Marines.
Complex moral reasoning: The decision maker acknowledges and considers the rights of others in the pursuit of fairness by using a social cooperation and consensus building approach that is consistently applied in a non-arbitrary fashion.
Why should boards have more female directors?
Boards with high female representation experience a 53% higher return on equity, a 66% higher return on invested capital and a 42% higher return on sales (Joy et al., 2007).
Having just one female director on the board cuts the risk of bankruptcy by 20% (Wilson, 2009).
When women directors are appointed, boards adopt new governance practices earlier, such as director training, board evaluations, director succession planning structures (Singh and Vinnicombe, 2002)
Women make other board members more civilized and sensitive to other perspectives (Fondas and Sassalos, 2000) and reduce 'game playing' (Singh, 2008)
Female directors are more likely to ask questions rather than nodding through decisions (Konrad et al., 2008).
Television Editors Live interviews with Chris Bart can be arranged using the
DeGroote School of Business's broadcast studio. Call Julia Thomson 905-525-9140
ext. 24871 to schedule airtime and book a live feed from campus.
Contact:
Chris Bart
Professor of Strategic Management
DeGroote School of Business
McMaster University
905-515-6399
bartck@mcmaster.ca
Julia Thomson
Manager of Marketing & Communications
DeGroote School of Business
McMaster University
905-525-9140 ext. 24871
thomsoj@mcmaster.ca
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Public release date: 25-Mar-2013
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