Competition & opportunity

Banks and banking ; Banking law ; Regulation Q: Prohibition Against Payment of Interest on Demand Deposits

Systemic environmental analysis of the legal mechanisms for controlling air pollution in the Las Vegas Valley

This study examines the air pollution control structure for the Las Vegas Valley. A System Dynamics computer model was created that represents the structure of the real world system for controlling air pollution, in order to examine how the current air pollution control system might behave in the future

U.S. monetary policy in an integrating world: 1960 to 2000

Monetary policy ; Federal Open Market Committee ; Monetary policy - United States

Turning marketing promises into business value: The experience of an industrial SME

The article studies the value that businesses should have for their customers and shareholders. It explains how to develop such value to meet or exceed customer's expectations through the application of the promise framework. The promise model includes promises made to customers, promises kept, and promises that involve a synchronized effort from the whole firm to create and deliver value to customers

Let them have fun! Workplace surveillance from Robert Owen's silent monitor to full-spectrum real-time human-capital quantification

Let them have fun! – but it’s no joke for growing numbers of otherwise-privileged white-collar employees whose every breath, word and key-stroke is recorded by wearable ‘multivariate predictive analytics’ like the Humanyze Badge and transmitted straight to managers. In Unto This Last, Ruskin wrote that political economy, ‘… assuming, not that the human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton … founds an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul’. The designers of contemporary work organisations go further in their assumptions. For them, human beings not of the managerial class have neither soul nor rights nor dignity unless, in an ersatz form, those things somehow improve profitability. The story of how we came to this terrifying pass shows how well-intentioned people accidentally turned concern for the well-being of the worker into the technology of corporate surveillance. Of course, it is not confined to employees: just about everyone is what Facebook has called ‘livestock’ for digital exploitation. In this talk, I look at the spine-chillingly and accidentally hilarious manifestations of work-place surveillance and ask if, so far from being the idiot fantasies of Silicon Valley geeks, such technologies writ large might be a threat to democracy and common humanity. … [to make] sure you’re getting the best possible returns from your … human capital investments, you should be concerned about the aging curves of your marketing people; you should want to know if your tech support folks will deliver better outcomes tomorrow than today; you should be predicting which sales teams will procure the most lucrative contracts with the minimum risks. (HBR, 2013)

Manipulation in interpersonal relationships :

Manipulation has historically been perceived as a negative behavioral characteristic. The problem of this study was to examine the utilization of Machiavellian manipulation by elementary school principals and to analyze the sources of variability in the use of manipulation according to gender.This study was concerned with the investigation of the behavioral characteristic of manipulation as an administrative skill. Adult Continuing Education is concerned with developmental learning skills as they apply to various professional work environments. Manipulation was the skill investigated. A sample of 60 educational administrators was defined from a population of 219 elementary school principals whose schools were located in Lawton, metropolitan Oklahoma City and metropolitan Tulsa. 30 principals were male and 30 principals were female.The statistical measurement used for the study was the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Two-Sample Test. The nonparametic test was selected because it is most sensitive to any kind of differences in the distributions from which the two samples were drawn--differences in location, central tendency, dispersion and skewness. Comparison of the data by gender obtained from the study indicates that male and female administrators both use Machiavellian manipulation, and there is no significant difference between groups. This necessitates further investigation of the modernization of the idea that manipulation is an organizational administrative tool and is used by both male and female administrators

Human Predation Risk Effects On Adult, Male White-Tailed Deer Antipredator Behavior

Recreational hunters play an important role in managing white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus); however, the potential for deer to alter behaviors to avoid hunters has not been addressed within the risk-allocation hypothesis. I evaluated magnitude (i.e., hunter density) and temporal variation (i.e., time of day and initial and prolonged exposure) in human predation risk on movements, resource selection, and observation rates of 37 adult male deer in southern Oklahoma. Deer recognized human predation risk by increasing diel path complexity and use of security cover with greater hunter density. Moreover, deer reduced movement rates and tortuosity while seeking out areas with security cover during prolonged exposure. However, tortuosity and use of security cover remained elevated with greater hunter density. These alterations in behaviors subsequently led to a decrease in observation rates during prolonged exposure. My results clearly support the predation risk-allocation hypothesis by the behavioral responses observed with greater hunter density

Seeking sustainability leadership

This paper critiques mainstream leadership and leadership development approaches to help inform the emerging field of sustainability leadership. Traditional leadership theory and education is argued to be highly problematic for the pursuit of sustainability leadership. A more critical approach is required, drawing upon insights from social theory, critical discourse analysis and psychology, which is attempted in this paper. Once deconstructed, leadership can be a useful framework for exploring needed learning and unlearning for people to become agents within leaderful groups to create more significant change in organizations and society, in light of unsustainability and injustice. The initial outlines of a reconstructed approach to leadership and its development, which are used at the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) and Impact International, are outlined

Controlling the crystal polymorph by exploiting the time dependence of nucleation rates

Most substances can crystallise into two or more different crystal lattices, called polymorphs. Despite this, there are no systems in which we can quantitatively predict the probability of one competing polymorph forming, instead of the other. We address this problem using large scale (hundreds of events) studies of the competing nucleation of the alpha and gamma polymorphs of glycine. In situ Raman spectroscopy is used to identify the polymorph of each crystal. We find that the nucleation kinetics of the two polymorphs is very different. Nucleation of the alpha polymorph starts off slowly but accelerates, while nucleation of the gamma polymorph starts off fast but then slows. We exploit this difference to increase the purity with which we obtain the gamma polymorph by a factor of ten. The statistics of the nucleation of crystals is analogous to that of human mortality, and using a result from medical statistics we show that conventional nucleation data can say nothing about what, if any, are the correlations between competing nucleation processes. Thus we can show that, with data of our form, it is impossible to disentangle the competing nucleation processes. We also find that the growth rate and the shape of a crystal depends on when it nucleated. This is new evidence that nucleation and growth are linked.Comment: 8 pages, plus 17 pages of supplementary materia

U.S. Monetary Policy in an Integrating World: 1960 to 2000

This article examines the impact of global developments on the practice of U.S. monetary policy, broadly defined to include regulatory and lender-of-last-resort functions as well as open market, discount, and intervention activity, over the past forty years. It is part of a paper presented at the forty-fifth economic conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The authors briefly review a few familiar facts establishing the increased openness of the U.S. economy, and go on to explore episodes when external events beyond those included in the domestic outlook—events like significant exchange rate shifts—appear to have influenced monetary policy decisions. They find that the view that U.S. monetary policy is mostly or even entirely domestically oriented is largely incorrect, in at least three different respects. Greater engagement with the rest of the world in both trade and financial transactions has led the U.S. economy to be more directly affected by overseas developments than it was three or four decades ago. Moreover, a perusal of FOMC records reveals extensive references to international developments in discussions of the future direction of monetary policy. And third, external competitive pressures have facilitated substantial changes in the structure of the U.S. financial system. This interplay between financial innovation and regulatory change has in turn affected how monetary policy works.Economic