1,602 research outputs found
Industrial Relations and Productivity in the U.S. Automobile Industry
macroeconomics, Automobile, industrial relations, productivity
Disordered Regimes of the one-dimensional complex Ginzburg-Landau equation
I review recent work on the ``phase diagram'' of the one-dimensional complex
Ginzburg-Landau equation for system sizes at which chaos is extensive.
Particular attention is paid to a detailed description of the spatiotemporally
disordered regimes encountered. The nature of the transition lines separating
these phases is discussed, and preliminary results are presented which aim at
evaluating the phase diagram in the infinite-size, infinite-time, thermodynamic
limit.Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX, 9 figures available by anonymous ftp to
amoco.saclay.cea.fr in directory pub/chate, or by requesting them to
[email protected]
The Revitalization of the CWA: Integrating Collective Bargaining, Political Action, and Organizing
ETHNOPSYCHIATRIC INTERPRETATIONS OF SCHIZOPHRENIC ILLNESS: THE PROBLEM OF NERVIOS WITHIN MEXICAN-AMERICAN FAMILIES
Workplace Turbulence and Workforce Preparedness
The year 1973 marked a divide in the postwar economy.1 During the 25 years between 1948 and 1973, private sector productivity increased at an annual rate of 2.9%. Productivity improvement after 1973 fell way below this long-term trend, leveling off at about 0.6% a year until 1981 and rising to only 1.6% a year between 1981 and 1987. A similar pattern is reflected in the real wages of the workforce.2The conventional interpretation of this difference in the U.S. economy before and after 1973 is that it reflects the combined influence of the OPEC oil shock and the influx into the labor market of inexperienced workers born in the postwar baby boom, possibly reinforced by growth in regulatory costs.3 However, when the productivity data are analyzed in a growth accounting framework, these economic factors can only account for about two thirds of the productivity decline.4 What then explains the balance of the shortfall in productivity? Many analysts have pointed to the intangible effects on managers of increased economic uncertainty since 1973âgrowing business cautiousness, increased emphasis on short-term financial objectives, and inadequate entrepreneurial incentives.5 But economic change and uncertainty can also affect productivity through their impact on jobs and workers
Evaluational adjectives
This paper demarcates a theoretically interesting class of "evaluational adjectives." This class includes predicates expressing various kinds of normative and epistemic evaluation, such as predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral adjectives, and epistemic adjectives, among others. Evaluational adjectives are distinguished, empirically, in exhibiting phenomena such as discourse-oriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb `find', and sorites-susceptibility in the comparative form. A unified degree-based semantics is developed: What distinguishes evaluational adjectives, semantically, is that they denote context-dependent measure functions ("evaluational perspectives")âcontext-dependent mappings to degrees of taste, beauty, probability, etc., depending on the adjective. This perspective-sensitivity characterizing the class of evaluational adjectives cannot be assimilated to vagueness, sensitivity to an experiencer argument, or multidimensionality; and it cannot be demarcated in terms of pretheoretic notions of subjectivity, common in the literature. I propose that certain diagnostics for "subjective" expressions be analyzed instead in terms of a precisely specified kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. I close by applying the account to `find x PRED' ascriptions
A novel algorithm for dynamic student profile adaptation based on learning styles
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.E-learning recommendation systems are used to enhance student performance and knowledge by providing tailor- made services based on the studentsâ preferences and learning styles, which are typically stored in student profiles. For such systems to remain effective, the profiles need to be able to adapt and reflect the studentsâ changing behaviour. In this paper, we introduce new algorithms that are designed to track student learning behaviour patterns, capture their learning styles, and maintain dynamic student profiles within a recommendation system (RS). This paper also proposes a new method to extract features that characterise student behaviour to identify studentsâ learning styles with respect to the Felder-Silverman learning style model (FSLSM). In order to test the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, we present a series of experiments that use a dataset of real students to demonstrate how our proposed algorithm can effectively model a dynamic student profile and adapt to different student learning behaviour. The results revealed that the students could effectively increase their learning efficiency and quality for the courses when the learning styles are identified, and proper recommendations are made by using our method
Pattern formation of reaction-diffusion system having self-determined flow in the amoeboid organism of Physarum plasmodium
The amoeboid organism, the plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum, behaves on
the basis of spatio-temporal pattern formation by local
contraction-oscillators. This biological system can be regarded as a
reaction-diffusion system which has spatial interaction by active flow of
protoplasmic sol in the cell. Paying attention to the physiological evidence
that the flow is determined by contraction pattern in the plasmodium, a
reaction-diffusion system having self-determined flow arises. Such a coupling
of reaction-diffusion-advection is a characteristic of the biological system,
and is expected to relate with control mechanism of amoeboid behaviours. Hence,
we have studied effects of the self-determined flow on pattern formation of
simple reaction-diffusion systems. By weakly nonlinear analysis near a trivial
solution, the envelope dynamics follows the complex Ginzburg-Landau type
equation just after bifurcation occurs at finite wave number. The flow term
affects the nonlinear term of the equation through the critical wave number
squared. Contrary to this, wave number isn't explicitly effective with lack of
flow or constant flow. Thus, spatial size of pattern is especially important
for regulating pattern formation in the plasmodium. On the other hand, the flow
term is negligible in the vicinity of bifurcation at infinitely small wave
number, and therefore the pattern formation by simple reaction-diffusion will
also hold. A physiological role of pattern formation as above is discussed.Comment: REVTeX, one column, 7 pages, no figur
Lyapunov spectral analysis of a nonequilibrium Ising-like transition
By simulating a nonequilibrium coupled map lattice that undergoes an
Ising-like phase transition, we show that the Lyapunov spectrum and related
dynamical quantities such as the dimension correlation length~ are
insensitive to the onset of long-range ferromagnetic order. As a function of
lattice coupling constant~ and for certain lattice maps, the Lyapunov
dimension density and other dynamical order parameters go through a minimum.
The occurrence of this minimum as a function of~ depends on the number of
nearest neighbors of a lattice point but not on the lattice symmetry, on the
lattice dimensionality or on the position of the Ising-like transition. In
one-space dimension, the spatial correlation length associated with magnitude
fluctuations and the length~ are approximately equal, with both
varying linearly with the radius of the lattice coupling.Comment: 29 pages of text plus 15 figures, uses REVTeX macros. Submitted to
Phys. Rev. E
Contested resources: unions, employers, and the adoption of new work practices in US and UK telecommunications
The pattern of adoption of high-performance work practices has been explained in terms of strategic contingency and in terms of union presence. We compare the post-deregulation/privatization changes in work practice at AT&T, Bell Atlantic and British Telecom. On the basis of these cases, we argue that the choice of new work practices should be understood as a consequence not only of the company's resources or changes in its environment, nor of a simple union presence, but also as a consequence of the practices' effects on union power, the nature of the union's engagement, and the union's strategic choices
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