Shorter University

About: Shorter University is a education organization based out in Rome, Georgia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Music education & Criminal justice. The organization has 58 authors who have published 75 publications receiving 1101 citations. The organization is also known as: Shorter.

Efficiency of Malaise traps and colored pan traps for collecting flower visiting insects from three forested ecosystems

Abstract: Pan and Malaise traps have been used widely to sample insect abundance and diversity, but no studies have compared their performance for sampling pollinators in forested ecosystems. Malaise trap design and color of pan traps are important parameters that influence insect pollinator catches. We compared pan trap (blue, yellow, white, and red) and Malaise trap catches from forests in three physiographic provinces (Piedmont, Coastal Plain, and Blue Ridge) of the southeastern United States. Similarities in trap performance between sites were observed with blue pan traps being most effective overall. Our results showed that various pollinator groups preferred certain pan trap colors and that adding color to Malaise traps influenced insect pollinator catches. However, pan traps generally caught more pollinators than Malaise traps. Because of their low cost and simplicity, using several colors of pan traps is an effective way to sample relative abundance and species richness of flower-visiting insects.

Servant Leadership: A Phenomenological Study Of Practices, Experiences, Organizational Effectiveness, And Barriers

Abstract: The subject of leadership is complex, and one of the main issues facing organizational leaders today is how to motivate employees to actively participate in the efforts that lead to accomplishing organizational goals. This study gathered lived experiences of 15 organizational leaders who practice the servant leadership philosophy, and explored how business leaders link their servant leadership practices to their organization’s effectiveness. The qualitative responses obtained during this study indicated that the perceived organizational barriers that prevent the servant leadership practices are the organization’s culture, the fear of change, and the lack of knowledge regarding the servant leadership philosophy. This study also gained insight into the impact that these organizational barriers have on one’s ability to practice servant leadership.

Heterogeneous Coupling Along Alaska-Aleutians as Inferred From Tsunami, Seismic, and Geodetic Inversions

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the uses of tsunami waveforms to determine the source parameters of the five great Alaskan–Aleutian earthquakes. The chapter reviews the generation, propagation, and observation of tsunamis. The method of tsunami waveform inversion is also described in the chapter. The slip distribution and seismic moment of the 1965 Rat Islands earthquake are determined and the results of the seismic and tsunami wave inversions are compared. Using the tsunami waveforms to estimate source parameters of a tsunamigenic earthquake involves both a forward and an inverse problem. The forward problem consists of the generation, propagation, and recording of the tsunami waveforms. The inverse problem consists of using a Green's function technique to invert the waveforms to determine some number of source parameters. The chapter also explains the expansion of the tsunami waveform inversion method to include the geodetic data for the study of the 1964 Prince William Sound earthquake, the second largest earthquake of the 20th century, which occurred on the continental margin.

Causal Beliefs of Public School Students about Success and Failure in Music

Abstract: Student motivation and achievement in relation to Attribution Theory were examined in this study. Public school students (N = 1,114) were asked to respond to items on Asmus's Music Attribution Orie...

The structure of fuzzy preferences: Social choice implications

Abstract: It has been shown that, with an alternative factorization of fuzzy weak preferences into symmetric and antisymmetric components, one can prove a fuzzy analogue of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem even when the transitivity requirements on individual and social preferences are very weak. It is demonstrated here that the use of this specification of strict preference, however, requires preferences to also be strongly connected. In the absence of strong connectedness, another factorization of fuzzy weak preferences is indicated, for which nondictatorial fuzzy aggregation rules satisfying the weak transitivity requirement can still be found. On the other hand, if strong connectedness is assumed, the fuzzy version of Arrow's Theorem still holds for a variety of weak preference factorizations, even if the transitivity condition is weakened to its absolute minimum. Since Arrow's Impossibility Theorem appeared nearly half a century ago, researchers have been attempting to avoid Arrow's negative result by relaxing various of his original assumptions. One approach has been to allow preferences – those of individuals and society or just those of society alone – to be “fuzzy.” In particular, Dutta [4] has shown that, to a limited extent, one can avoid the impossibility result (or, more precisely, the dictatorship result) by using fuzzy preferences, employing a particularly weak version of transitivity among the many plausible (but still distinct) definitions of transitivity that are available for fuzzy preferences. Another aspect of exact preferences for which the extension to the more general realm of fuzzy preferences is ambiguous is the factorization of a weak preference relation into a symmetric component (indifference) and an antisymmetric component (strict preference). There are several ways to do this for fuzzy weak preferences, all of them equivalent to the traditional factorization in the special case when preferences are exact, but quite different from each other when preferences are fuzzy (see, for example, [3]). A recent paper in this journal [1], by A. Banerjee, argues that the choice of definitions for indifference and strict preference, given a fuzzy weak preference, can also have “Arrovian” implications. In particular, [1] claims that Dutta's version of strict preference presents certain intuitive difficulties and recommends a different version, with its own axiomatic derivation, for which the dictatorship results reappear even with Dutta's weak version of transitivity. However, the conditions used to derive [1]'s version of strict preference imply a restriction on how fuzzy the original weak preference can be, namely, that the fuzzy weak preference relation must be strongly connected. Without this restriction, I will show that the rest of [1]'s conditions imply yet a third version of strict preference, for which Dutta's possibility result under weak transitivity still holds. On the other hand, if one accepts the strong connectedness required in order for it to be valid, I show that [1]'s dictatorship theorem can in fact be strengthened to cover any version of transitivity for fuzzy preferences, no matter how weak, and further, that this dictatorship result holds for any “regular” formulation of strict preference, including the one originally used by Dutta.