Because star employees are more visible and productive, they are likely to be sought out by others and develop an information advantage through their abundant social capital. However, not all of the information effects of stardom are beneficial. We theorize that stars' robust social capital may produce an unintended side effect of information overload. We highlight the role of human resource management in minimizing the effects of information overload for stars, and we discuss avenues for future research.

How technique is changing science

Catching Falling Stars: A Human Resource Response to Social Capital's Detrimental Effect of Information Overload on Star Employees

This article discusses research on the machine coding of international event data from international and regional news sources using the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS). First, we suggest that the definition of an “event” should be modified so that events are explicitly and unambiguously defined in terms of natural language. Second, we discuss KEDS: a Macintosh-based machine coding system using pattern recognition and simple linguistic parsing to code events using the WEIS event categories. Third, we compare the Reuters international news service reports with those of two specialized regional sources: the foreign policy chronologies in the Journal of Palestine Studies and the German language biweekly publication Informationen .

We conclude by noting that machine coding, when combined with the numerous sources of machine-readable text that have become available in the past decade, has the potential to provide a much richer source of event data on international political interactions than that currently available. The ease of machine coding should encourage the creation of event coding schemes developed to address specific theoretical concerns; the increased density of these new data sets may allow the study of problems that could not be analyzed before.

methods

/pdf/machine-coding-of-event-data-using-regional-and-56c39y8l0z.pdf

Machine coding of event data using regional and international sources

Evaluating the human condition occurs in many disciplines - for example, epidemiology, sociology, political sciences, criminology, and market research. Despite advances in these fields progress has been sluggish compared with that in the “hard” sciences. A primary force for rapid developments in these sciences has been the discovery and use of new technologies (for example, the polymerase chain reaction, electron microscopy, carbon-14 dating), which increase the precision of measurement and reduce costs, resulting in a rapid accumulation of knowledge.1,2 Human population science has society as its laboratory and “counting humans” as its basis. Counting techniques, however, have changed little this century. The use of capture-recapture techniques could bring about a paradigm shift in how counting is done in all the disciplines that assess human populations.

Historically, the main approach to evaluating human populations has been to find the members of a community with a characteristic of interest and count them - for example, researchers have counted people with a particular disease (epidemiology), income level (economics), and party affiliation (political science). This approach is rooted in the belief that one needs to count and classify everyone to know about them. Complete enumeration, though, is costly and inefficient. Alternatives such as sampling a small group and extrapolating the results to a region or nation have been developed. These techniques may, however, be slow, costly, limited, and “foreign” to the people who need the data for policy - for example, governments.

Governments typically cannot …

/pdf/assessing-the-human-condition-capture-recapture-techniques-3ya2xujc5e.pdf

Assessing the human condition: capture-recapture techniques.

Nonlinear chemically dissipative mechanisms have been proposed as providing a possible underlying process for some aspects of biological self-organization, pattern formation, and morphogenesis. Nonlinearities during the formation of microtubular solutions result in a chemical instability and bifurcation between pathways leading to macroscopically self-organized states of different morphology. The self-organizing process, which contains reactive and diffusive contributions, involves chemical waves and differences in microtubule concentration in the sample. Patterns of similar appearance are observed at different distance scales. This behavior is in agreement with theories of chemically dissipative systems.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/264/5156/245.full.pdf

Morphological bifurcations involving reaction-diffusion processes during microtubule formation

Global firms often struggle to replicate practices among their culturally and geographically dispersed subsidiaries. Part of the reason for this is that certain practices, including human resource management (HRM) practices, are complex and context specific. In this study, we develop a framework to help identify how firms might overcome challenges of practice replication through alignment of information systems, application processes, and people. We find that managerial alignment of formal processes and systems, along with informal alignment of people (shared objectives), improve the capability of a multinational corporation (MNC) to replicate human resource practices across subsidiaries. We also discuss managerial implications.

background

Global challenges to replicating HR: The role of people, processes, and systems

Systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge