Be Our Guest: Crafting a Magical Client Experience

The Client Services team of Valparaiso University’s IT department found inspiration in Disney’s guest service models and has been building a culture of superior service throughout IT. Come along on a magic carpet ride to discover how this new world is transforming delivery of technological services to the campus. From Help Desk to training to assessment, we are increasing satisfaction levels among campus constituents as we meet their needs. We will show how we created a guest service compass that guides our decision-making and service delivery. Further, we will share areas where we learned we were creating our own obstacles in empowering staff to provide service to our guests and how we improvement

Executive Compensation in American Unions

[Exerpt] Studying compensation in the nonprofit sector is difficult. In nonprofit organizations, it is not always clear what the objectives of the organization are and, therefore, perhaps even more difficult to consider how to compensate managers than in the for-profit sector. This paper investigates the determinants of executive compensation of leaders of American labor unions. We use panel data on more than 75,000 organization-years of unions from 2000 to 2007 which allows us to examine within union differences over time. We specifically concentrate on two issues of importance to unions – the level of membership and the wages of union members. Both measures are strongly related to the compensation of the leaders of American labor unions, even after controlling for organization size and individual organization fixed-effects. That is, within the same union, higher levels of membership size and average member wage over time are associated with higher levels of pay for union leaders. Additionally, the elasticity of pay with respect to membership for unions is very similar to the elasticity of pay with respect to employees in for-profit firms over the same period

Executive Compensation in American Unions

[Excerpt] Studying compensation in the non-profit sector is difficult. In non-profit organizations, it is not always clear what the objectives of the organization are and, therefore, perhaps even more difficult to consider how to compensate managers. This paper investigates the determinants of executive compensation of leaders of American labor unions. We use panel data on more than 75,000 organization-years of unions from 2000 to 2007 to investigate these issues. We specifically concentrate on two issues of importance to unions – the level of membership and the wages of union members. Both measures are strongly related to compensation of the leaders of American labor unions, even after controlling for organization size and individual organization fixed-effects. Additionally, the elasticity of pay with respect to membership for unions is very similar to elasticity of pay with respect to employees in for-profit firms over the same period

Executive Compensation in American Unions (CRI 2009-007)

Studying compensation in the nonprofit sector is difficult. In nonprofit organizations, it is not always clear what the objectives of the organization are and, therefore, perhaps even more difficult to consider how to compensate managers than in the for-profit sector. This paper investigates the determinants of executive compensation of leaders of American labor unions. We use panel data on more than 75,000 organization-years of unions from 2000 to 2007. We specifically concentrate on two issues of importance to unions – the level of membership and the wages of union members. Both measures are strongly related to the compensation of the leaders of American labor unions, even after controlling for organization size and individual organization fixed-effects. Additionally, the elasticity of pay with respect to membership for unions is very similar to the elasticity of pay with respect to employees in for profit firms over the same period

In-Vivo Bytecode Instrumentation for Improving Privacy on Android Smartphones in Uncertain Environments

In this paper we claim that an efficient and readily applicable means to improve privacy of Android applications is: 1) to perform runtime monitoring by instrumenting the application bytecode and 2) in-vivo, i.e. directly on the smartphone. We present a tool chain to do this and present experimental results showing that this tool chain can run on smartphones in a reasonable amount of time and with a realistic effort. Our findings also identify challenges to be addressed before running powerful runtime monitoring and instrumentations directly on smartphones. We implemented two use-cases leveraging the tool chain: BetterPermissions, a fine-grained user centric permission policy system and AdRemover an advertisement remover. Both prototypes improve the privacy of Android systems thanks to in-vivo bytecode instrumentation.Comment: ISBN: 978-2-87971-111-

Alternative Chicks: Examining Women Freeskiers and Empowerment

We consider the possibility of rethinking gender through alternative sports. In particular, we focus on freeskiing (often referred to as extreme skiing) and argue that freeskiing offers a space in which traditional mainstream values can be questioned to a far greater extent than in mainstream sport cultures (like those of football, softball, and ice hockey). If so, they provide an opportunity for alternative understandings of gender to emerge. We examine what would need to happen within the world of freeskiing in order for a more inclusive understanding of gender to emerge through the process of worldmaking. More specifically, we consider various factors within the subculture of freeskiing that influence questions concerning gender constructions including the presentation of women athletes in films, magazines, and other sport media, conceptions of gender among non-competitive backcountry skiers, and the general understanding of the relationship between humans and nature within the sport. We argue that gaining a better understanding of these features is an important step in considering how conceptions of gender may be altered in the sport of skiing

A Study of Vernacular Architecture in Late Bronze/Early Iron Age Crete

Abstract of paper read at the International Conference on Vernacular Architecture as a Frame of Life in Historic and Ancient Communities, Technische Universität Berlin & Freie Universität Berlin, 4-7 April 2019.Vernacular architecture is closely linked to both time and place and reflects what most people in a community or region consistently build and use, working with local materials, and traditional techniques and forms. It is a product of design decisions intended to create a built environment that accommodates a community’s own sociocultural needs and ways of living. Our study of the architecture of the Late Bronze/Early Iron Age settlement at Kavousi Vronda (Crete) offers a case study in methods of documentation, analysis, and interpretation of ancient vernacular architecture. First excavated by Harriet Boyd Hawes in 1900, the site of Kavousi Vronda was the focus of more extensive archaeological investigation from 1987-1992 under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. This work revealed a small rural settlement dating to the Late Minoan IIIC period (ca. 1170-1050 B.C.) with 15-20 houses, a large building with storerooms where communal feasting and drinking rituals took place, a freestanding temple of the “goddess with upraised arms,” and a kiln. All of these structures, regardless of function, were built using the same techniques and local materials: unworked fieldstones, bedrock boulders, mud mortar, and timber beams covered with clay for the flat roofs. While abandonment and post-abandonment processes have resulted in much disturbance, Vronda provides a wealth of data for understanding domestic architecture, household activities, religion and society. In this paper, a close reading of the Vronda settlement architecture allows us to interrogate how human interaction at both the household and suprahousehold levels were expressed in the built environment. Field documentation of the rubble architecture at the time of excavation included scale drawings and photographs. In our subsequent study of the site, we have employed additional tools (e.g., photogrammetry, 3D modeling, and space syntax analysis) and have borrowed approaches used in modern architectural design, urban planning, ethnography, and anthropology. An archaeological perspective also allows us to observe changes to individual buildings and the settlement over time. Our analysis suggests that the domestic complexes are distributed throughout the settlement and show agglutinative growth that reflects the expansion of the co-residential groups who inhabited each complex over several generations. By comparison, the structures with specialized functions occupy more prominent positions and do not provide any evidence of architectural phasing to show that they were modified over time. The identification of common and exceptional material characteristics, spatial relationships, and change over time reveals the efforts of the community to address their needs and establish their identity and sense of place in the built environment