The Business of Human Resources

[Excerpt] The result of this missing ingredient is the basic reason for the variability that exists within the profession. In fact, a lot of business leaders do not clearly understand what HR is responsible or accountable for. Many are quick to relegate HR to social initiatives planning (e.g., United Way drives, company picnics), missing the value the function can provide to the business. In this paper I seek to address these issues by suggesting a four-factor framework for running the HR function like a business: (1) understanding the business HR is supporting, (2) developing a basic operating philosophy, (3) determining which HR products and services should be linked directly to business success, and (4) operating HR as a business

Corticofugal projections from the anterior olfactory nucleus target olfactory bulb principal cells

The anterior olfactory nucleus (AON) is a cortical structure reciprocally connected with the olfactory bulb (OB) and the piriform cortex. Here, using small extracellular and intracellular injections to trace the terminal projections in the OB from individual cells in the rat AON, and examining the morphology and distribution of these projections, I report that these projections appear to preferentially target and directly synapses with mitral cells. These findings suggests that the AON acts to modulate incoming olfactory information based on ongoing processing, perhaps in a way that tunes the OB to signal the presence of particular odors

Preliminary Remarks on Mises in Interwar Vienna.

The professional class of which Ludwig von Mises (and to some extent also his friend Kelsen) was a member was not only fond of thinking of itself as the defender of their highly cultured environment. This large group of intellectuals, administrators, aristocrats, and politicians had also been raised to belief that they are the intellectual safeguard of a large multinational empire of well over 50 million people. The incredibly diverse ethnic composition of the Habsburg Empire gave it the appearance of an unique international and cosmopolitan order. The unexpected situation in which the fatefully reduced little Austria found itself as a result of the catastrophic war raised a new set of unprecedented problems which most scholars who had routinely come to assume that their primary tasks were attached to a huge multi-national Empire found difficult to turn their attention to. Their society had disappeared. While the final collapse of the old Habsburg Empire had become a fairly general expectation by late 1917, virtually no one had expected the state of affairs which was actually about to emerge. By 1918 the section of the Austrian population which considered itself heir to the ideals of European “liberalism” had been reduced to a position of political powerlessness. Mises found it especially difficult to turn his attention to the smaller problems and as he gradually became detached from the ethos of old Austria, his life and thought began almost reflexively to revolve around a social order which was characterized by the rule of law and peaceful cooperation, but which did not yet exist. Following old Austrian liberal tradition, von Wieser was the first to emphasize that an intimate connection existed between the conceptual foundations of legal and political theory on the one hand, and those of economic theory on the other.

On Menger, Austrian Economics, and the Use of General Equilibrium.

Nowadays mainstream economic textbooks maintain that economic laws can be established solely on the foundations of the exact sciences, such as mathematics or physics. The implication is that the historical date collected with the aid of statistics and other technical means can be used to scientifically unveil, explain, and predict mankind’s behavior. Although economics today embodies individual tastes in the form of elegant charts that are depicted in text books as ‘indifference curves’, it has not gone further in characterizing the all important motivations, influences, or feelings of the acting individuals. If the sole purpose of economic research is to analyze the properties of general equilibrium in the conditions of perfect knowledge and perfect competition, this may well suffice. It seems as if all approaches to economic phenomena which do not follow this doctrine are quickly branded unscientific and repudiated. Rather than constructing a system of timeless general equilibrium prices, as is the goal of the mathematically oriented schools of thought, in our world of scarcity, lack or dispersion of knowledge, and ever changing degrees of expectations, the Austrians attempt to explain the forces and causes that stand behind the price formation. The two main pillars of the Austrian school of economics are methodological individualism (a term used by J.A. Schumpeter) and methodological subjectivism. This approach to economic phenomena builds scientific analysis upon the insight that every individual chooses and acts purposively and in accordance with his perception of the expected actions of others. In observing the actions of others we are aided by our ability to “understand” the meaning of such actions because we are human beings and thus have insights into the behavior of our fellow men.

DISCUSSION OF FINANCING STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT SERVICES IN A CYCLICAL ECONOMY

Public Economics,

Traffic Analysis for the Calibration of Risk Assessment Methods

In order to provide some measure of the uncertainty inherent in the sorts of charting data that are provided to the end-user, we have previously proposed risk models that measure the magnitude of the uncertainty for a ship operating in a particular area. Calibration of these models is essential, but the complexity of the models means that we require detailed information on the sorts of ships, traffic patterns and density within the model area to make a reliable assessment. In theory, the ais system should provide this information for a suitably instrumented area. We consider the problem of converting, filtering and analysing the raw ais traffic to provide statistical characterizations of the traffic in a particular area, and illustrate the method with data from 2008-10-01 through 2008-11-30 around Norfolk, VA. We show that it is possible to automatically construct aggregate statistical characteristics of the port, resulting in distributions of transit location, termination and duration by vessel category, as well as type of traffic, physical dimensions, and intensity of activity. We also observe that although 60 days give us suffi- cient data for our immediate purposes, a large proportion of it—up to 52% by message volume—must be considered dubious due to difficulties in configuration, maintenance and operation of ais transceivers

Establishing a Regional AIS Application Specific Message Register

The goal of the Regional AIS Application Specific Message Register is to provide awareness of what applications exist, facilitate harmonization, and promote proper binary messaging for regional applications. To be hosted on the IALA website, establishing the Register will be a 3-step process: 1) Compile all existing AIS binaries into a Jcollection.K 2) Convert the JcollectionK into a Register. 3) Develop IALA guidance on best practices for creating and using AIS Binary Messages. Recommendations are provided in regard to: - Benefit of a web-based HTML user interface for input/output. - Use of XML to organize/format register applications in a consistent manner. - Having the collection/registration become a JloopK process. - Conforming to ISO standards to organize and manage the Register. - Benefit of a joint IMO-IALA register for both international and regional applications

Extension of CART using multiple splits under order restrictions

CART was introduced by Breiman et al. (1984) as a classification tool. It divides the whole sample recursively in two subpopulations by finding the best possible split with respect to a optimisation criterion. This method, restricted up to date to binary splits, is extended in this paper for allowing also multiple splits. The main problem with this extension is related to the optimal number of splits and the location of the corresponding cutpoints. In order to reduce the computational effort and enhance parsimony, the reduced isotonic regression was used in order to solve this problem. The extended CART method was tested in a simulation study and was compared with the classical approach in an epidemiological study. In both studies the extended CART turned out to be a useful and reliable alternative