The Division of Labour, Worker Organisation, and Technological Change

The model developed in this paper explains differences in the division of labour across firms as a result of computer technology adoption. We find that changes in the division of labour can result both from reduced production time and from improved communication possibilities. The first shifts the division of labour towards a more generic structure, while the latter enhances specialisation. Although there exists heterogeneity, our estimates for a representative sample of Dutch establishments in the period 1990-1996 suggest that productivity gains have been the main determinant for shifts in the division of labour within most firms. These productivity gains have induced skill upgrading, while in firms gaining mainly from improved communication possibilities specialisation increased and skill requirements have fallen.labour economics ;

The Division of Labour, Worker Organisation, and Technological Change

The model developed in this paper explains differences in the division of labour across firmsas a result of computer technology adoption. We find that changes in the division of labourcan result both from reduced production time and from improved communicationpossibilities. The first shifts the division of labour towards a more generic structure, while thelatter enhances specialisation. Although there exists heterogeneity, our estimates for arepresentative sample of Dutch establishments in the period 1990-1996 suggest thatproductivity gains have been the main determinant for shifts in the division of labour withinmost firms. These productivity gains have induced skill upgrading, while in firms gainingmainly from improved communication possibilities specialisation increased and skillrequirements have fallen.education, training and the labour market;

Event Indexing Systems for Efficient Selection and Analysis of HERA Data

The design and implementation of two software systems introduced to improve the efficiency of offline analysis of event data taken with the ZEUS Detector at the HERA electron-proton collider at DESY are presented. Two different approaches were made, one using a set of event directories and the other using a tag database based on a commercial object-oriented database management system. These are described and compared. Both systems provide quick direct access to individual collision events in a sequential data store of several terabytes, and they both considerably improve the event analysis efficiency. In particular the tag database provides a very flexible selection mechanism and can dramatically reduce the computing time needed to extract small subsamples from the total event sample. Gains as large as a factor 20 have been obtained.Comment: Accepted for publication in Computer Physics Communication

Hyper-systolic processing on APE100\/Quadrics: n2^{2}-loop computations

We investigate the performance gains from hyper-systolic implementations of n^2-loop problems on the massively parallel computer Quadrics, exploiting its 3-dimensional interprocessor connectivity. For illustration we study the communication aspects of an exact molecular dynamics simulation of n particles with Coulomb (or gravitational) interactions. We compare the interprocessor communication costs of the standard-systolic and the hyper-systolic approaches for various granularities. We predict gain factors as large as 3 on the Q4 and 8 on the QH4 and measure actual performances on these machine configurations. We conclude that it appears feasile to investigate the thermodynamics of a full gravitating n-body problem with O(10000) particles using the new method on a QH4 system

Exploring the computer-mediated communication option for crises management in Nigeria

A given society is rocked by crisis of malevolence when social misfits take recourse to acts of criminality or other unlawful means for the sole purpose of venting their spleen or frustration on or seeking undue gains from the people and the social institutions, probably with the aim of destabilizing or destroying the entire social system. The successful armed robbery attack on four banks in Nsukka and consequent killing of Nsukka Divisional Police Officer on 17 July 2009, represent a typical instance of crisis of malevolence that has become a regular feature of social life in a good number of Nigerian cities and urban areas. This paper explores the applicability of computer-mediated communication interface as a crisis management strategy in Nigeria. The value of this approach derives from the fact that in crisis situations, decision-making capabilities rely on accurate reports from all parties involved. However, recent crisis events have shown that existing communication infrastructures can become overloaded or even witness unprecedented outright system collapse. The need, therefore for crisis-management technology to cope with nondeterministic environments resulting from the global wired-communication break-down has made imperative a communication-interface prototype to support language-independent communication and reduce the chances of ambiguity and multitude of semantic interpretation of human observers’ reports. Herein lies the value of this visual language interface type of computer-mediated communication developed by Siska Fitraine and Leon Rothkrantz as a comprehensive experimental system for maintaining reliable communication in crisis events.

Using communicative patterns to predict Twitter users' social capital, likability, and popularity gains with natural language processing

Social media constructs a computer-mediated public space where individuals' visibility and influence can be quantitatively measured by the number of likes, retweets, and followers they receive. These metrics serve as a reward system that not only reflects users' popularity and social capital but also influences the climate of public opinion and deliberative democracy by encouraging and discouraging certain types of communication. Through analyzing Twitter data collected from U.S. congressional politicians and ordinary U.S. Twitter users in seven/eight waves, this study explores how communicative patterns--dual-process styles and sentiment--predict users' social capital, likability, and popularity gains on Twitter as well as how political identity and intergroup communication moderate the relationships between these variables. It found that: (a) rational expressions increase social capital and popularity gains while emotional expressions increase likability gains; (b) positive expressions generate a curvilinear effect on social capital, likability, and popularity gains in the politician dataset; (c) compared with Democratic users, Republican users receive relatively more social capital, likability, and popularity gains from emotional and negative expressions than from rational and positive expressions; (d) rational expressions lead to relatively more likability and popularity gains than emotional expressions in a group-salient context; and (e) positive expressions in ingroup/outgroup conversations generate opposite effects in the politician and ordinary user datasets. In addition, this study develops and advances computational methods in detecting communicative patterns, political identities, and intergroup communication. By implementing Distributed Dictionary Representations, this study creates metrics to measure dual-process thinking styles and sentiment in text; by developing a two-step model with deep learning using an attention mechanism, this study creates an interpretable method to detect political partisanship and intergroup communication.Includes bibliographical references

Analysis of Issues for Project Scheduling by Multiple, Dispersed Schedulers (distributed Scheduling) and Requirements for Manual Protocols and Computer-based Support

Although computerized operations have significant gains realized in many areas, one area, scheduling, has enjoyed few benefits from automation. The traditional methods of industrial engineering and operations research have not proven robust enough to handle the complexities associated with the scheduling of realistic problems. To address this need, NASA has developed the computer-aided scheduling system (COMPASS), a sophisticated, interactive scheduling tool that is in wide-spread use within NASA and the contractor community. Therefore, COMPASS provides no explicit support for the large class of problems in which several people, perhaps at various locations, build separate schedules that share a common pool of resources. This research examines the issue of distributing scheduling, as applied to application domains characterized by the partial ordering of tasks, limited resources, and time restrictions. The focus of this research is on identifying issues related to distributed scheduling, locating applicable problem domains within NASA, and suggesting areas for ongoing research. The issues that this research identifies are goals, rescheduling requirements, database support, the need for communication and coordination among individual schedulers, the potential for expert system support for scheduling, and the possibility of integrating artificially intelligent schedulers into a network of human schedulers