University of Southern California

About: University of Southern California is a education organization based out in Los Angeles, California, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Cancer. The organization has 73160 authors who have published 169955 publications receiving 7838906 citations. The organization is also known as: USC & University of Southern CA.

Compensation and Incentives: Practice vs. Theory

Abstract: A thorough understanding of internal incentive structures is critical to developing a viable theory of the firm, since these incentives determine to a large extent how individuals inside an organization behave. Many common features of organizational incentive systems are not easily explained by traditional economic theory--including egalitarian pay systems in which compensation is largely independent of performance, the overwhelming use of promotion-based incentive systems, the absence of up-front fees for jobs and effective bonding contracts, and the general reluctance of employers to fire, penalize, or give poor performance evaluations to employees. Typical explanations for these practices offered by behaviorists and practitioners are distinctly uneconomic--focusing on notions such as fairness, equity, morale, trust, social responsibility, and culture. The challenge to economists is to provide viable economic explanations for these practices or to integrate these alternative notions into the traditional economic model.

When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals May Not Recognize

Abstract: Researchers in moral psychology and social justice have agreed that morality is about matters of harm, rights, and justice. With this definition of morality, conservative opposition to social justice programs has appeared to be immoral, and has been explained as a product of various non-moral processes, such as system justification or social dominance orientation. In this article we argue that, from an anthropological perspective, the moral domain is usually much broader, encompassing many more aspects of social life and valuing institutions as much or more than individuals. We present theoretical and empirical reasons for believing that there are in fact five psychological systems that provide the foundations for the world's many moralities. The five foundations are psychological preparations for detecting and reacting emotionally to issues related to harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Political liberals have moral intuitions primarily based upon the first two foundations, and therefore misunderstand the moral motivations of political conservatives, who generally rely upon all five foundations.

Genome-wide association study of 107 phenotypes in Arabidopsis thaliana inbred lines

Abstract: Although pioneered by human geneticists as a potential solution to the challenging problem of finding the genetic basis of common human diseases, genome-wide association (GWA) studies have, owing to advances in genotyping and sequencing technology, become an obvious general approach for studying the genetics of natural variation and traits of agricultural importance. They are particularly useful when inbred lines are available, because once these lines have been genotyped they can be phenotyped multiple times, making it possible (as well as extremely cost effective) to study many different traits in many different environments, while replicating the phenotypic measurements to reduce environmental noise. Here we demonstrate the power of this approach by carrying out a GWA study of 107 phenotypes in Arabidopsis thaliana, a widely distributed, predominantly self-fertilizing model plant known to harbour considerable genetic variation for many adaptively important traits. Our results are dramatically different from those of human GWA studies, in that we identify many common alleles of major effect, but they are also, in many cases, harder to interpret because confounding by complex genetics and population structure make it difficult to distinguish true associations from false. However, a-priori candidates are significantly over-represented among these associations as well, making many of them excellent candidates for follow-up experiments. Our study demonstrates the feasibility of GWA studies in A. thaliana and suggests that the approach will be appropriate for many other organisms.

Type-2 fuzzy logic systems

Abstract: We introduce a type-2 fuzzy logic system (FLS), which can handle rule uncertainties. The implementation of this type-2 FLS involves the operations of fuzzification, inference, and output processing. We focus on "output processing," which consists of type reduction and defuzzification. Type-reduction methods are extended versions of type-1 defuzzification methods. Type reduction captures more information about rule uncertainties than does the defuzzified value (a crisp number), however, it is computationally intensive, except for interval type-2 fuzzy sets for which we provide a simple type-reduction computation procedure. We also apply a type-2 FLS to time-varying channel equalization and demonstrate that it provides better performance than a type-1 FLS and nearest neighbor classifier.

Principles and challenges of genome-wide DNA methylation analysis

Abstract: Methylation of cytosine bases in DNA provides a layer of epigenetic control in many eukaryotes that has important implications for normal biology and disease. Therefore, profiling DNA methylation across the genome is vital to understanding the influence of epigenetics. There has been a revolution in DNA methylation analysis technology over the past decade: analyses that previously were restricted to specific loci can now be performed on a genome-scale and entire methylomes can be characterized at single-base-pair resolution. However, there is such a diversity of DNA methylation profiling techniques that it can be challenging to select one. This Review discusses the different approaches and their relative merits and introduces considerations for data analysis.