Purpose: The purpose of this research is to compare the levels of EI of male and female students, EI among students of three different academic faculties: business, engineering and nursing and the degree of change in their EI over the course of study. Additionally, the authors set out to isolate and quantify the effects of gender and field of study, independent of each other.Design/methodology/approach: This empirical research is based on a survey of >750 undergraduate college students, in which participants answered a host of Likert-scale questions concerning perceptions of risk, self-efficacy, career path and entrepreneurial intent (EI). The survey also contained a number of demographic questions, including academic field (major) and year of study.Findings: Business students express the highest levels of EI, followed by engineering students and nursing students respectively. Regardless of discipline, students become no more or less entrepreneurial over their years of study. Overall, males were found to be significantly more entrepreneurial than females. However, a comparison of males and females within a given faculty yielded almost no differences in EI between the genders.Originality/value: These findings suggest that students self-select into fields of study based on traits, personalities and interests. It is these same factors that regulate one's EI and not their gender or field of study. Others have analyzed the effects of gender and field of study, the authors isolated the two and analyzed each independently.

We investigate the manual selection of numbers by lottery participants, with a database consisting of over 800 million selections from 118 consecutive draws of the national lottery in Israel. Our findings replicate results from prior research and introduce novel discoveries. (1) Preference for, and avoidance of, specific numbers 1 through 37 are consistent throughout all the drawings. Strong, but differing preferences are observed in the selection of the “power” number ranging from 1 to 7. (2) The number of guesses entered per draw correlates with the size of the prize, with each additional million in prize money generating 33,000 additional manual guesses. (3) Number preferences are strongly influenced by their location on the form. Numbers in the first of the four horizontal rows are consistently the most popular, while numbers in the fourth rows are consistently unpopular. (4) As the number of guesses increases, popularly chosen numbers tend to become slightly less popular, while unpopular numbers tend to become less unpopular.

Entrepreneurship is central to economic development. Thus, understanding the underpinnings of entrepreneurship behavior is of crucial importance. This paper addresses the impact of parents' careers on the entrepreneurial intentions (EIs) of their children. Specifically, it determines the degree to which self-employed parents increase or decrease the desire of children to be self-employed as well. Among the noteworthy findings of this research, self-employed mothers have a greater positive impact on the EI of their children than self-employed fathers. This finding also holds true for sons and daughters when each offspring gender is analyzed individually. Sons and daughters differ when both parents are self-employed. Among males, the highest EI is observed when both parents are self-employed. Surprisingly, for daughters, EI is lower when both parents are self-employed than when only one parent is self-employed. The paper concludes with a possible explanation for the observed differences between EI in males and females.

Our research, based on a sample of 500 veterans currently studying at Israeli colleges and universities, suggests that certain aspects of military service are associated with greater entrepreneurial intentions. Specifically, the desire to engage in entrepreneurship is higher among veterans with command experience than veterans without. Similarly, veterans of technological units generally express greater entrepreneurial interest than veterans of combat units. A comparison of commissioned and noncommissioned officers yields curious results and offers a possible direction for further investigation. Although Israel is among the few countries that maintains a mandatory draft, the general applicability of these findings to countries with volunteer forces is discussed.

The Russian–Ukrainian conflict is considered as a dynamic system, whose variables are factors affecting the losses of the Russian army and the threat of the use of nuclear weapons. A fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) is used for modeling, that is, a directed graph whose vertices are model variables, and the weights of arcs are the degrees of positive and negative influences of variables on each other. The following factors influencing the losses of the Russian army and the threat of a nuclear strike were selected: resistance of the Ukrainian army, support of Ukraine with weapons, economic sanctions against Russia, opposition to the Russian government and its self-preservation instinct. The degrees of the influence of factors on each other and on the possibility of using nuclear weapons are evaluated by experts using fuzzy terms, which correspond to numeric values. To adjust the FCM, a genetic algorithm is used to select the degrees of influence of factors that minimize the discrepancy between the simulation results and expert estimations. The obtained FCM is used for scenario modeling of the conflict according to the “what if” scheme and ranking of factors according to their degree of influence on the level of nuclear threat.

Researchers have found evidence of both hot hand and gambler’s fallacy biases in lottery number selection. Which of the two opposite effects is observed is often dependent upon the nature of the lottery game, the particular sample, the local culture of the participants, or the time transpired since the seed event. By observing hundreds of millions of lottery entries over 118 consecutive semiweekly drawings, we present evidence of both effects and their longitudinal properties. With respect to the selection ofindividualnumbers, lottery participants tend to avoid recently selected winning numbers. This gambler’s fallacy effect diminishes and the number becomes increasingly ‘hot’ until it is selected again. With respect to winning numbercombinations, we found strong evidence of a small but persistent hot hand bias. This bias gradually diminishes over time, but remains detectable and highly consistent for a number of years.