The Emergence of Shell Valuable Exchange in the New Guinea Highlands

Shell valuable exchange in the New Guinea Highlands has been a key interest in anthropology, providing insight into economics, aesthetics, and social stratification amongst banded communities. This paper describes how shell exchange at ethnographic present reflects deeper historical processes. We trace the origins and subsequent changes in shell use from the terminal Pleistocene to the Late Holocene at the site of Kiowa in Chimbu Province, Papua New Guinea. Zooarchaeological and technological analyses of Kiowa’s shell artifacts indicates riverine mussel was procured locally from the terminal Pleistocene (9,500–10,000 years ago) and featured as a minor component in the diet into the recent precolonial period. In contrast, evidence for marine shell valuables only appears in the Late Holocene in the form of Trochus armbands and Tegillarca granosa and Polymesoda cf. erosa multifunctional tools. This challenges ideas that associate the gradual dispersal of marine shell into the highlands with the spread of agriculture around the Wahgi Valley at the start of the Holocene, and supports punctuated pulses of coastal contact. In doing so, we formulate a testable model for the development of shell exchange into the highlands, with implications for the emergence of stratification and the conduits between the interior and coast

Deming-Based Lean Six Sigma Management as an Answer to Escalating Hospital Costs

Escalating hospital costs are a major issue confronting American society; one of the main sources is an outmoded management paradigm. This paradigm uses management by objectives to set objectives without regard to the causes of process variation, and enforces these objectives through the traditional performance appraisal system. A better paradigm is available for controlling hospital costs; it is called Deming-based Lean Six Sigma management

The Globalization of America's Research Universities: Does the Globalization Mission Pose a Moral Dilemma?

A dilemma resides in the interaction between intellectually free and independent universities and colleges that exist in areas with repressive governments/regimes. Given a repressive indigenous cultural, religious, and political climate, can and/or will those governments keep their hands off the curriculum, the conduct of instruction and research, the contents of libraries, as well as the composition of faculty and student bodies? The academic mission of America's research universities is tripartite in nature, embracing: (1) the transmission of existing knowledge, i.e. teaching; (2) extending the boundaries of knowledge, i.e. research; and (3) the development of a capacity for critical thinking in student minds, and the exercise of that capacity by the faculty. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT

The higher education scene in America some observations

This book discusses a number of issues that confront America's higher education scene today. Those issue embrace such problems as: (1) the missions(s) of our colleges and universities and the development of critical thinking and/or employability; (2) the role of for-profit academic institutions; (3) the impact of online technology; (4) diffusion of power and achievement of consensus between administrators and faculty; (5) the importance of financial matters, embracing budgets, fundraising, and endowments; (6) the insidious problem of conflicts of interest; (7) the scandalous impact of big-time, big-money Division 1 sports on academe; (8) the growth of non-academic functions; and (9) the importance of leadership in consensual institutions and how leaders are chosen