An Exploration of Firm Performance Factors in Family Businesses: Do Families Value Only the "Bottom Line"?

Achieving the founder's vision is considered one of the most important organizational objectives for the continued survival and success of family firms. Yet, family dynamics is usually recognized as one of the main causes as to why less than one third of family businesses survive into the second generation of ownership. Contradicting this, others have found that family firms succeed as a result of the strong family ties that bind them. Thus, it appears that family-run firms are a rich mix of complex and interesting themes at play at any one time. Given this rather unsettled portrait of family businesses, we explore the factors of success for these types of businesses framed around the notion that families might value non-financial performance measures over hard "bottom line" results depending on extant family conditions

Surgeons or Scribes? The Role of United States Court of Appeals Law Clerks in Appellate Triage

Using original survey data, we explore how federal courts of appeals judges select and use their law clerks—a question that we answered in an earlier article about federal district court clerks. As with that first article, we do not intend to tackle such normative issues as whether courts of appeals law clerks possess too much influence over the judicial process or whether the selection criteria used by these judges is appropriate. What we will present, however, is descriptive data on the criteria that courts of appeals judges use to pick their law clerks as well as the tasks assigned to those clerks. We believe that our findings, namely, that courts of appeals judges delegate substantial job duties to their clerks, should serve as the springboard for a future debate over the wisdom of such delegation

CHAPARRAL: A library for solving large enclosure radiation heat transfer problems

Large, three-dimensional enclosure radiation beat transfer problems place a heavy demand on computing resources such as computational cycles, memory requirements, disk I/O, and disk space usage. This is primarily due to the computational and memory requirements associated with the view factor calculation and subsequent access of the view factor matrix during solution of the radiosity matrix equation. This is a fundamental problem that constrains Sandia`s current modeling capabilities. Reducing the computational and memory requirements for calculating and manipulating view factors would enable an analyst to increase the level of detail at which a body could be modeled and would have a major impact on many programs at Sandia such as weapon and transportation safety programs, component survivability programs, energy programs, and material processing programs. CHAPARRAL is a library package written to address these problems and is specifically tailored towards the efficient solution of extremely large three-dimensional enclosure radiation heat transfer problems

Field-tuned quantum tunneling in a supramolecule dimer [Mn4]2[Mn_4]_2

Field-tuned quantum tunneling in two single-molecule magnets coupled antiferromagnetically and formed a supramolecule dimer is studied. We obtain step-like magnetization curves by means of the numerically exact solution of the time-dependent Schr\H{o}dinger equation. The steps in magnetization curves show the phenomenon of quantum resonant tunneling quantitatively. The effects of the sweeping rate of applied field is discussed. These results obtained from quantum dynamical evolution well agree with the recent experiment[W.Wernsdorfer et al. Nature 416(2002)406].Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Submited to Phys. Rev.

Picking Federal Judges: A Note on Policy and Partisan Selection Agendas

The importance of lower federal courts in the policymaking process has stimulated extensive research programs focused on the process of selecting the judges of these courts and the factors influencing their decisions. The present study employs judicial decisionmaking in the U.S. Courts of Appeals as a window through which to reexamine the politics of selection to the lower courts. It differs from previous studies of selection in three ways. First, it takes advantage of recent innovations in measurement to go beyond reliance on political party as a measure of the preferences of actors in the selection process. Second, employing these new measures it examines the relative effects of the operation of policy and partisan agendas in the selection process. Third, a more complex model of selection is assessed than in most previous studies--one that expressly examines the role of senators and senatorial preferences in the selection process

Surgeons or Scribes? The Role of United States Court of Appeals Law Clerks in Appellate Triage

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Strange matrix elements of the nucleon

Results for the disconnected contributions to matrix elements of the vector current and scalar density have been obtained for the nucleon from the Wilson action at beta=6 using a stochastic estimator technique and 2000 quenched configurations. Various methods for analysis are employed and chiral extrapolations are discussed.Comment: Lattice2002(matrixel), 3 pages, 3 figure

Demographic Disparities in 1-to-Many Facial Identification

Most studies to date that have examined demographic variations in face recognition accuracy have analyzed 1-to-1 matching accuracy, using images that could be described as "government ID quality". This paper analyzes the accuracy of 1-to-many facial identification across demographic groups, and in the presence of blur and reduced resolution in the probe image as might occur in "surveillance camera quality" images. Cumulative match characteristic curves(CMC) are not appropriate for comparing propensity for rank-one recognition errors across demographics, and so we introduce three metrics for this: (1) d' metric between mated and non-mated score distributions, (2) absolute score difference between thresholds in the high-similarity tail of the non-mated and the low-similarity tail of the mated distribution, and (3) distribution of (mated - non-mated rank one scores) across the set of probe images. We find that demographic variation in 1-to-many accuracy does not entirely follow what has been observed in 1-to-1 matching accuracy. Also, different from 1-to-1 accuracy, demographic comparison of 1-to-many accuracy can be affected by different numbers of identities and images across demographics. Finally, we show that increased blur in the probe image, or reduced resolution of the face in the probe image, can significantly increase the false positive identification rate. And we show that the demographic variation in these high blur or low resolution conditions is much larger for male/ female than for African-American / Caucasian. The point that 1-to-many accuracy can potentially collapse in the context of processing "surveillance camera quality" probe images against a "government ID quality" gallery is an important one.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, Conference submissio