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lunedì 29 febbraio 2016

# img: synchronous fireflies


<< I took this photo of fireflies (lightning bugs) in almost complete darkness using the latest low-light camera technology. I was completely surrounded by the fireflies and witnessed one of the most amazing and magical natural phenomena: fireflies that synchronize.>>

Radim Schreiber, 13th Annual Smithsonian.com Photo Contest

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/photocontest/detail/altered-images/synchronous-fireflies-lightning-bugs/?

Catie Leary. Wildlife photography shines in Smithsonian's annual photo contest. February 29, 2016, 6:45 a.m.

http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/blogs/wildlife-photography-shines-smithsonian-annual-photo-contest

# rmx-s-behav: echoes from the Cambrian explosion

<< these early arthropods displayed such sophisticated predatory behavior >>

Jeff Sossamon, Feb. 16, 2016

http://munews.missouri.edu/news-releases/2016/0216-500-million-year-old-fossils-show-how-extinct-organisms-attacked-their-prey/

<< What  she  found  was  that  the  trilobite  traces  intersected  the  worm  burrows  more  often  than  would  be expected  by  random  chance.  The  fossils  also  show  evidence  that  suggests  the  trilobites  were  selective in  hunting  their  preypreferring  smaller  wormsand  that  trilobites  attacked  their  prey  at  low  angles  more frequently  than  expectedimproving  their  chances  of  grabbing  onto  and  handling  their  prey  >>

Jordan Yount, Friday, January 29, 2016.

https://coas.missouri.edu/news/early-trilobite-gets-worm

Tara Selly, John Warren Huntley, et al. Ichnofossil record of selective predation by Cambrian trilobites. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. 15 Feb. 2016, Vol.444:28–38, doi:10.1016/j.palaeo.2015.11.033

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2015.11.033

sabato 27 febbraio 2016

# n-ethno: dancing to the tailored predat ... solution

<< A number of recent studies suggest that dressing up for work in a suit or blazer could do wonders for an employee’s productivity, whether going into a negotiation, making a sales call or even participating in a videoconference with business associates >>

Ray A. Smith. Why Dressing for Success Leads to Success New research shows that when workers wear nicer clothes, they achieve more. Feb. 21, 2016 10:05 p.m. ET

http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-dressing-for-success-leads-to-success-1456110340

<< Wearing more formal clothing was associated with higher action identification level (Study 1) and greater category inclusiveness (Study 2). Putting on formal clothing induced greater category inclusiveness (Study 3) and enhanced a global processing advantage (Study 4). The association between clothing formality and abstract processing was mediated by felt power (Study 5). The findings demonstrate that the nature of an everyday and ecologically valid experience, the clothing worn, influences cognition broadly, impacting the processing style that changes how objects, people, and events are construed. >>

Michael L. Slepian, Simon N. Ferber, et al. The Cognitive Consequences of Formal Clothing. Social Psychological and Personality Science August 2015 vol. 6 no. 6 661-668. doi: 10.1177/1948550615579462

http://m.spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/04/02/1948550615579462.short

venerdì 26 febbraio 2016

# n-ethno: leadership obsession: “The West Wing” vs “House of Cards”

<< In “Leadership BS” a book published last year, Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, identifies five virtues that are almost universally praised by popular leadership writers—modesty, authenticity, truthfulness, trustworthiness, and selflessness—and argues that most real-world leaders ignore these virtues. (If anything, they tend to be narcissistic, back-stabbing, self-promoting shape-shifters.) To Pfeffer, the leadership industry is Orwellian. Its cumulative effect is to obscure the degree to which companies are poorly and selfishly run for the benefit of the powerful people in charge. That’s why bosses spend billions on leadership seminars: they make corporate life look like “The West Wing,” even though, in reality, it’s more like “House of Cards.” >>

Joshua Rothman. Shut Up and Sit Down
Why the leadership industry rules.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/our-dangerous-leadership-obsession

https://mobile.twitter.com/NewYorker/status/702359780438974464

# n-ethno-behav: a (quasi-) long-term persistence: the "big man"


<< Muscular  men  perceived  to  be  better  leaders  than  physically  weak  ones >>

http://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/news-release/want-be-seen-leader-get-some-muscle

Lukaszewski, Aaron W., Simmons, Zachary L., et al. The Role of Physical Formidability in Human Social Status Allocation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dec 14 , 2015.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000042

more:

the big man "mumi":

Douglas Olivier. A Solomon Island Society: Kinship and Leadership among the Siuai of Bouganville. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955

# s-gst: modulational instabilities

<< Modulational instability has been known since the 1960s. When you have small perturbations at the input, you’ll have big changes at the output >>

Now <<  it appears that (AA) have captured the essence of the phenomenon >>

http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2016/02/042.html

Gino Biondini, Dionyssios Mantzavinos. Universal Nature of the Nonlinear Stage of Modulational Instability. Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 043902 – Published 27 January 20

http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.043902

mercoledì 24 febbraio 2016

# s-gst: tracing nonlocal surreal behaviors ...

<< (..) particles at the quantum level can in fact be seen as behaving something like billiard balls rolling along a table, and not merely as the probabilistic smears that the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests. But there’s a catch – the tracks the particles follow do not always behave as one would expect from “realistic” trajectories, but often in a fashion that has been termed “surrealistic” >>

http://www.cifar.ca/assets/researchers-demonstrate-quantum-surrealism/

Dylan H. Mahler, Lee Rozema, et al. Experimental nonlocal and surreal Bohmian trajectories. Science Advances  19 Feb 2016:
Vol. 2, no. 2, e1501466. DOI: 10.1126/science.1501466

http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1501466

http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/2/e1501466.full-text.pdf+html