Brandman University

Purpose Hybrid entrepreneurship is the practice of individuals launching a business while simultaneously maintaining their primary job in paid employment. This study examines how cognitive multitasking impacts psychological distress among hybrid entrepreneurs using job demands-resources theory to investigate the mediating roles of stress, sleep quality and perceived health. Design/methodology/approach Data from 228 Quebec hybrid entrepreneurs were analyzed using sequential mediation modeling with Macro-Process. Findings While hybrid entrepreneurs vary in their ability to compartmentalize dual roles, cognitive multitasking is positively associated with psychological distress. While sleep quality does not directly mediate this relationship, it operates through two indirect pathways: increasing stress levels and deteriorating self-rated health. Both stress and self-rated health significantly mediate between cognitive multitasking and psychological distress. Research limitations/implications Cross-sectional design limits causal inferences. Future research should employ longitudinal designs and objective measures across diverse contexts. Practical implications Hybrid entrepreneurs should implement structured time management techniques and prioritize sleep hygiene. Organizations should offer flexible work arrangements and stress management resources, while entrepreneurship support programs should incorporate well-being components addressing dual-career challenges. Social implications Addressing the psychological and physiological costs of hybrid entrepreneurship can foster sustainable entrepreneurial activity while reducing work-related psychological distress and associated societal costs. Originality/value This study advances research on entrepreneurial well-being by examining how multitasking affects psychological health in hybrid entrepreneurs, addressing an understudied segment, highlighting cognitive and physiological costs and clarifying the complex relationships between cognitive multitasking, sleep, stress, health and psychological distress.

Abstract We propose a method for comparing survival data based on higher criticism of $ p $-values obtained from many exact hypergeometric tests. The method accommodates noninformative right-censorship and is sensitive to hazard differences in unknown and relatively rare time intervals. It attains much better power against such differences than the log-rank test and its variants. We demonstrate the usefulness of our method in detecting rare and weak non-proportional hazard differences compared to existing tests using simulations and gene expression data. Additionally, we analyse the asymptotic power of our method and other tests under a theoretical framework describing two groups experiencing failure rates that are usually identical over time, except in a few unknown instances where one group’s failure rate is higher. Our test’s power experiences a phase transition across the plane of rarity and intensity parameters that mirrors the phase transition of higher criticism in two-sample rare and weak normal and Poisson means settings. The region of the plane in which our method has asymptotically full power is larger than the corresponding region for the log-rank test.

Abstract Congenitally hearing-impaired individuals have reduced auditory localization capabilities and often find identification of sources to be challenging in noisy environments. The congenital nature of their hearing-impairment and the fact that hearing is the only modality capable of representing the full three-dimensional surrounding, mean this population have never experienced a proper representation of their spatial surrounding. We use an inhouse tactile device, which performs level weighting to four vibration actuators to the fingers to reproduce spatial positions and Higher-order Ambisonics to test congenitally hearing-impaired and typically-hearing individuals on their ability to pair between localized tactile information and audio sources within a complex three-dimensional audio environment. Participants of both groups show accuracy significantly higher than chance, with the typically hearing performing better than the hearing impaired. We further see rapid improvement in the task with no training. We discuss the importance of our findings within the discourse of sensory binding and assistive development towards rehabilitation.

Diffusion models have revolutionized the field of content synthesis and editing. Recent models have replaced the traditional UNet architecture with the Diffusion Transformer (DiT), and employed flow-matching for improved training and sampling. However, they exhibit limited generation diversity. In this work, we leverage this limitation to perform consistent image edits via selective injection of attention features. The main challenge is that, unlike the UNet-based models, DiT lacks a coarse-to-fine synthesis structure, making it unclear in which layers to perform the injection. Therefore, we propose an automatic method to identify "vital layers" within DiT, crucial for image formation, and demonstrate how these layers facilitate a range of controlled stable edits, from non-rigid modifications to object addition, using the same mechanism. Next, to enable real-image editing, we introduce an improved image inversion method for flow models. Finally, we evaluate our approach through qualitative and quantitative comparisons, along with a user study, and demonstrate its effectiveness across multiple applications.