A software project has “Hero Developers” when 80% of contributions are delivered by 20% of the developers. Are such heroes a good idea? Are too many heroes bad for software quality? Is it better to have more/less heroes for different kinds of projects? To answer these questions, we studied 661 open source projects from Public open source software (OSS) Github and 171 projects from an Enterprise...

Heroes play collectivist or individualist roles in imagination and self-development. Representations of heroic figures in questionnaires given to French (n = 241) and Spanish (n = 227) samples of 10 and 15-year-olds were examined to assess the extent that heroes originated in digital media, and whether they were proximal or distal personalities. There is strong evidence that heroes in this samp...

Declaring and thinking about heroes are common human preoccupations but surprisingly aspects of heroism that reinforce these behaviors are not well-understood. In four thematically consistent studies, we attempt to identify lay perspectives about the psychological functions served by heroes. In Study 1, participants (n = 189) freely generated open-ended descriptions of hero functions, which wer...

1 Dipartimento di Scienze di Sanità Pubblica, Sezione di Parassitologia, University of Rome-La Sapienza, Rome, Italy, 2 Department of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom, 3 Centre Medical Saint Camille, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, 4 Kenya Medical Research Institute, Wellcome Trust Programme, Centre for Geographic Medicine Resea...

T his issue brings the 14th in the ‘‘Heroes and Martyrs of Quality and Safety’’ series. More are to come. With a new editor of this journal on board, it is a good moment to define the content of the series. It is about people—present and past—who have found an opportunity to improve health, their efforts to carry out the needed improvements and to measure the results. These people are patient c...

In this essay, I examine differences between individual and social play and, in particular, the differences between individual and social play within digital media forms designed to promote both: massively multi-player online computer games (MMOGs). The analysis considers in most depth differences between group and solo play within the NCSoft’s and Cryptic Studios’ MMOG, City of Heroes. Based o...

Dota 2 is a multiplayer online game in which two teams of five players control “heroes” and compete to earn gold and destroy enemy structures. Teamwork is essential and heroes are chosen to create a balanced team that will counter the opponents’ selections. We studied how the win rate depends on hero selection by performing logistic regression with models that incorporate interactions between h...

Empirical tests described in this article support hypotheses derived from evolutionary theory on the perceptions of literary characters. The proper and dark heroes in British Romantic literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries respectively represent long-term and short-term mating strategies. Recent studies indicate that for long-term relationships, women seek partners wit...

the most important and well- known epic of armenian is the legend of sasonś heroes. this epic has been compiled and written in the 16 th century but it has been told orally since 11th century. this epic is divided into four parts narrating the story of four generations of the heroes of armenian city, sason. comparing tales of this text with shâhnâme, one can vividly see that there exist minimum...