Search

The Sustainable Value Creation Diamond is a metaphorical model for leaders in any firm aiming to create sustainable value. The paper’s purpose is to further develop earlier original work done by the author initially focused on farms, making it now applicable to all types of firms. It builds on the Resource-Based Theory of the firm broadening the model’s use to the management of a wide spectrum of organizations. The importance of “Time” in “Value Creation” is recognized through the construct of “Time to Value Capture”. The diamond metaphor’s source domain meaning is that of lasting and sought after value. It is an original graphical model and a powerful illustration of the core claims of the model. The model could be used as a blueprint in the decisional process of an organization as well as an educational tool to illustrate the synergies in the existent literature on firms’ performance.

Abstract Every human and non-human animal must make tradeoffs in investments in terms of time, energy, and resources. The aim of this study was to extrapolate from the types of investments in survival and reproduction that non-human animals make and translate these into human motivations. 16 potential goals were presented to 851 childless, 18–23-year-old adults from 11 world regions in an online study. Each young adult was asked to weight the importance of every goal to his or her ideal life. Weights had to sum to 100, requiring tradeoffs. Results revealed striking agreement across young adults with only four goals weighted above chance: Finding a beloved romantic partner, being physically and emotionally healthy, and earning money or resources. Having lots of sexual partners was the least important goal across all world regions for both sexes. Nevertheless, men more than women valued having many sexual partners, being talented outside work, being physically strong, and having a physically attractive romantic partner. Overall, there was cultural variation in some of the less important goals. Helping young adults achieve success requires understanding their own goals, rather than focusing on popularized depictions of what young adults desire.

Abstract Background In Israel, coverage of health needs is delivered by four health maintenance organizations (HMOs), which are budgeted by the government according to the recommendations of the National Drug Formulary (NDF) Committee. For medications not listed in the NDF, individuals may request to cover the costs by the HMO Exemptions Committee (DEC). The objectives of the current study, a first of its kind, are to document the DEC decision process, to identify its components and to determine the decisions’ clinical outcome. Methods This retrospective cohort study included all members (≥ age 18) of the Maccabi Healthcare Service (MHS) who submitted a request to the DEC between June 2017 and December 2018. Collected data include patient demographics, clinical information and components of the decision process. Decision success (i.e., clinical outcome correlated with DEC decision) was determined by clinical outcome over at least one-year follow-up. Results A total of 335 requests were included. Strong evidence and rare disease were positively associated with approvals, while the availability of alternative treatments and costs were negatively associated. The majority of decisions (75%) met predicted clinical outcomes. Only estimated costs were found to be associated with decision success. Conclusions Factors that reduce the potential costs of a requested drug are significantly associated with higher odds for drug approval, but only when the evidence supports potential benefit.

This study explores the relationship between corporate sustainability, focusing on social performance and its impact on financial performance in the technology industry. Using secondary data from the Refinitiv Eikon database, covering 4,825 companies from 2019-2023, the research uses multiple regression models to analyze associations between sustainability variables and key financial indicators, mainly return on assets (ROA) and return on equity (ROE). Findings reveal a robust and statistically significant positive effect of social performance on ROE, complemented by positive impacts of workforce, human rights, community, and product responsibility in the models. In addition, company size consistently demonstrates a strong positive influence on ROE in all models. These results contribute valuable insights into the intersection of sustainability initiatives and financial performance in the technology sector.

The digital agriculture adoption strive by farmers could be assimilated with the adoption efforts of the computer technologies (ICT) by their respective users in other professional fields. Therefore, this paper proposes the adaptation of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Usage of Technology (UTAUT) model to explore the motivations for the use of digital tools by field crop farmers in Romania. The history of TAM and UTAUT is explored as well as the usage of UTAUT2 and UTAUT3 in digital agriculture adoption studies globally. Furthermore, comparison is also made with other farmer studies based on a different research architecture conceived also to explore their motivations to use digital agriculture tools. The proposed model is building on the decades long research and validation of the UTAUT model, and it will be employed in subsequent quantitative studies to evaluate the Romanian farmers’ motivations to embrace the digital agriculture technologies and practices. The paper is the outcome of the individual research done by the author and it was enhanced following academic debates and conference presentations. It is deemed to have a dual applicability, as a field tool for academic research but also provides guidance for companies developing digital tools for farmers in Romania and beyond.

The purpose of this paper is to further strengthen the belief within the academic, professional and policy making communities about the need to speed up the adoption of Agriculture 4.0 technologies in the Romanian farms as the grassroot constituents of the national agriculture in order to secure their future competitiveness in the context of new European agricultural policies and regulations. A review of the most influential papers and the bibliometric mapping of articles on change management as well as ways to accelerate change processes through change agents is discussed. Agrinnovator is the think tank of young digital agriculture practitioners in the Romanian farms. Their public policy proposal to create The Farm Technology Officers Program in order to accelerate digitalization through relevant change agents is also discussed. Their interviews highlighted the need for government support in creating scale and impetus for the digitalization of agriculture. It is deemed to be a structural countrywide change that will happen faster if the adequate change agents are used.

In selective laser melting technology, the productivity and the efficiency of powder utilisation were examined. Individual components of the printing time were determined by developing a specially designed model. Two main components of the powder recoating and the laser exposure time were given as a function of the filling ratio of the cross-section. Based on the results, the spreading time can increase the printing time by several hours, depending on the filling factor of the cross-section. In the case of a sampling of 70 prints, the individual elements and process of the powder usage were determined, as well as the mass measurement of the different amounts of powder in the case of 316L and Ti6Al4V materials. It turned out that 45–80% of the powder amount is not used to build the model, which is an essential for both printer users and equipment developers for material cost prediction.

This study aims to explore in-service preschool teachers' attitudes towards and beliefs about geometry and its teaching and to investigate their knowledge of shapes and solids. The study uses a mixed descriptive approach employing quantitative and qualitative research methods. Thirty-four Israeli preschool teachers of children aged 3-6 from 34 different preschools and kindergartens participated in the study and responded to a questionnaire comprised of closed and open items. Regarding their attitudes and beliefs, the preschool teachers were asked about: the meaning of geometry; affinity for geometry, importance of geometry; need to use accurate mathematical language, and about their enjoyment of engaging young children in activities connected with learning geometry. As to the knowledge of shapes and solids, the preschool teachers were asked to describe or define shapes and solids, name shapes and solids and distinguish between rectangles and other shapes. The results illustrate that most of the preschool teachers like geometry or expressed a neutral position towards geometry, but some hate geometry. Most of the preschool teachers comprehend the importance of engaging in activities that relate to geometry in preschool and enjoy involving young children in activities connected with learning geometry. As to the use of accurate language, most of the preschool teachers maintain that accurate mathematical language should be applied when preschool children aged 3-6 deal with shapes and solids. Yet, only about half of them believe that it is necessary to use accurate language when the children are at an earlier age. Certain preschool teachers lack the knowledge to name shapes and solids, even those which are part the mathematics curriculum for ages 3-6. They exhibited difficulties in using accurate mathematical language when describing shapes and solids, and were influenced by the shapes' visual appearance rather than by their definitions and properties. It is recommended that preschool teachers attend further development programs so they can appropriately involve young children in activities connected to learning geometry, as required by the curriculum.

Mental model (Johnson-Laird, 2001) and probabilistic theories (Oaksford & Chater, 2009) claim to provide distinct explanations of human reasoning. However, the dual strategy model of reasoning suggests that this distinction corresponds to different reasoning strategies, termed "counterexample" and "statistical," respectively. There is clear evidence that most people have a preference for a given strategy, and that this predicts performance on a variety of forms of reasoning and judgment (Thompson & Markovits, 2021). To date, however, the evidence for this conclusion has been correlational in nature; in the current studies, we manipulated strategy use. To this end, we gave people (N = 885) explicit instructions to reason either using a counterexample strategy or a probabilistic strategy. In two studies, we observed that the ability to follow these instructions was constrained by people's spontaneous strategy use, and that the effect of instructions carried over to two subsequent forms of reasoning (a) belief-biased inferences and (b) base-rate judgments. Finally, the ability to follow instructions was correlated with reasoning accuracy on both tasks. These results provide strong evidence for the underlying reality of the dual strategy model and show that explicit instructions to reason differently can modify performance on different forms of reasoning.

Abstract Human males are considered to be more competitive than females. However, females must also compete for resources necessary for their own and their offsprings’ survival. Since females use more indirect forms of competition than males, comparing observable forms of competition may be misleading. One critical driver of competition is resource asymmetry. Since competition occurs primarily within sex, reactions to resource asymmetry with same-sex peers should provide an important measure of competitiveness. We asked 596 married participants, 25–45 years of age with at least one child from three different countries to evaluate how same-sex individuals they know would react to a target individual who had a valuable resource that the same-sex individuals did not have. Half the participants evaluated reactions to same-sex targets, while the other half evaluated reactions to other-sex targets. Participants reported that women would react more negatively than men to resource asymmetry with same-sex targets, but not other-sex targets. These results suggest that women may be even more competitive than men in contexts when important resources related to reproductive success are at stake.

There is little consensus about the underlying parameters of human reasoning. Two major theories have been proposed that suppose very different mechanisms. The mental model theory proposes that people use working memory intensive processes in order to construct limited models of problem parameters. Probabilistic theories propose that reasoning is a process by which people use the sum of their existing knowledge in order to generate an estimate of the probability of a conclusion given problem parameters. Following an initial proposition by Verschueren et al., the dual-strategy model supposes that these different approaches to reasoning are in fact an important individual difference. Specifically, a recently developed diagnostic questionnaire has identified two major categories of reasoners: Counterexample reasoners use a mental model form of processing, while Statistical reasoners use a probabilistic form of processing. In the following, I describe results that show that the Counterexample/Statistical distinction affects information processing across a variety of reasoning and judgment tasks. In addition, strategy use correlates with performance on very different kinds of thinking, such as contingency judgments, processing of negative emotions, or susceptibility to social biases. Although this distinction is related to differences in cognitive ability, it has been found to predict performance over and above these differences. More recent results have shown that it is possible to experimentally modify strategy use. These results suggest that strategy use is an important individual difference that can affect performance in a wide variety of contexts.

Gender differences in mathematics learning outcomes are still evident in many countries participating in large scale international testing, as well as in national testing in Israel, the context in which the study reported here was conducted. The participants were 281 students from three Israeli elementary schools and were in grades 4 and 6. The students completed a questionnaire with items based on a selection of variables included in explanatory models for gender differences in mathematics. It was found that many students held gendered beliefs related to mathematics learning, particularly when the questions asked related to themselves or to significant others in their lives (parents and teachers); the views of the majority of students were gender neutral. When presented with two photographs--a man, and a woman--and asked who was the one more likely to work with mathematics, it was clear that the students' choices and explanations echoed perceptions of mathematics as a male domain.

La presente investigación tiene como objetivo identificar la influencia de la lengua de herencia en la lengua dominante en hablantes de origen aimara (HH) en el norte de Chile. El concepto de HH se refiere a la descripción de un perfil lingüístico que adquiere su lengua materna o lengua de herencia (LH) en una comunidad donde la LH es minoritaria y luego, al salir a la comunidad dominante, adquiere la lengua mayoritaria como L2. Para llevar a cabo este propósito, se diseñó y se aplicó una propuesta didáctica para el desarrollo de la biliteracidad en niños y niñas HH bilingües aimara-español. Veintidós estudiantes de 7 a 13 años participaron en la propuesta pedagógica que se realizó en cuatro sesiones, de cuatro horas pedagógicas cada una, que tuvo como producto final la elaboración de una narración escrita bilingüe en pasado por cada participante. El análisis de los textos escritos finales mostró la presencia de léxico aimara en las narraciones, así como la presencia de una sintaxis y morfología española influida por la sintaxis y morfología aimara. Se concluye que existe una interacción constante entre dos sistemas lingüísticos, conocimiento fundamental para la planificación y desarrollo de un currículo bilingüe-intercultural.