5,895 research outputs found
Total quality management: Strengths and barriers to implementation and cultural adaptation
NASA/Langley Research Center (LaRC) is in the process of implementing Total Quality Management (TQM) throughout the organization in order to improve productivity and make the Center an even better place to work. The purpose of this project was to determine strengths and barriers to TQM being implemented and becoming a part of the organizational culture of the Human Resources Management Division (HRMD) at Langley. The target population for this project was both supervisory and nonsupervisory staff of the HMRD. In order to generate data on strengths and barriers to TQM implementation and cultural adaptation, a modified nominal group technique was used
Production of black holes and their angular momentum distribution in models with split fermions
In models with TeV-scale gravity it is expected that mini black holes will be
produced in near-future accelerators. On the other hand, TeV-scale gravity is
plagued with many problems like fast proton decay, unacceptably large
neutron-antineutron oscillations, flavor changing neutral currents, large
mixing between leptons, etc. Most of these problems can be solved if different
fermions are localized at different points in the extra dimensions. We study
the cross-section for the production of black holes and their angular momentum
distribution in these models with "split" fermions. We find that, for a fixed
value of the fundamental mass scale, the total production cross section is
reduced compared with models where all the fermions are localized at the same
point in the extra dimensions. Fermion splitting also implies that the bulk
component of the black hole angular momentum must be taken into account in
studies of the black hole decay via Hawking radiation.Comment: accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
Validating Network Value of Influencers by means of Explanations
Recently, there has been significant interest in social influence analysis.
One of the central problems in this area is the problem of identifying
influencers, such that by convincing these users to perform a certain action
(like buying a new product), a large number of other users get influenced to
follow the action. The client of such an application is a marketer who would
target these influencers for marketing a given new product, say by providing
free samples or discounts. It is natural that before committing resources for
targeting an influencer the marketer would be interested in validating the
influence (or network value) of influencers returned. This requires digging
deeper into such analytical questions as: who are their followers, on what
actions (or products) they are influential, etc. However, the current
approaches to identifying influencers largely work as a black box in this
respect. The goal of this paper is to open up the black box, address these
questions and provide informative and crisp explanations for validating the
network value of influencers.
We formulate the problem of providing explanations (called PROXI) as a
discrete optimization problem of feature selection. We show that PROXI is not
only NP-hard to solve exactly, it is NP-hard to approximate within any
reasonable factor. Nevertheless, we show interesting properties of the
objective function and develop an intuitive greedy heuristic. We perform
detailed experimental analysis on two real world datasets - Twitter and
Flixster, and show that our approach is useful in generating concise and
insightful explanations of the influence distribution of users and that our
greedy algorithm is effective and efficient with respect to several baselines
DIRBE External Calibrator (DEC)
Under NASA Contract No. NAS5-28185, the Center for Space Engineering at Utah State University has produced a calibration instrument for the Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE). DIRBE is one of the instruments aboard the Cosmic Background Experiment Observatory (COBE). The calibration instrument is referred to as the DEC (Dirbe External Calibrator). DEC produces a steerable, infrared beam of controlled spectral content and intensity and with selectable point source or diffuse source characteristics, that can be directed into the DIRBE to map fields and determine response characteristics. This report discusses the design of the DEC instrument, its operation and characteristics, and provides an analysis of the systems capabilities and performance
A Comparison of Certification Requirements for Vocational Business and Office Education Teachers in Kentucky and Bordering States
A thesis presented to the Business Education Graduate Committee at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Business Education by V. Glenn Tyra on July 15, 1974
Public policies for the working poor: The earned income tax credit versus minimum wage legislation
This paper documents the declining relationship between low hourly wages and low household income over the last half-century and how this has reduced the share of minimum wage workers who live in poor households. It then compares recent and prospective increases in the earned income tax credit (EITC) and the minimum wage as methods of increasing the labor earnings of poor workers. Data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) are used to simulate the effects of both programs. Increases in the EITC between 1989 and 1992 delivered a much larger proportion of a given dollar of benefits to the poor than did increases in the minimum wage from 4.25. Scheduled increases in the EITC through 1996 will also do far more for the working poor than raising the minimum wage.
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