Whose Job Is It, Anyway? Capital Strategies for Labor

[Excerpt] When corporate mergers and takeovers create massively debt-ridden new entities, with the resulting pressures to sell off assets, reduce costs (especially wages) and close marginal operations, it is the company\u27s workers and their communities who suffer. And, when corporate managers accept, and even encourage, huge levels of waste, or ignore obvious opportunities because they aren\u27t profitable enough, workers and their communities end up paying for the resulting inefficiencies and lost potential. I believe that a hallmark of the new economic era we seem to be entering will be that workers and unions will be forced to actively concern themselves with all aspects of an employer\u27s business — with the intricate details of corporate structure, finance, and operations. In the process, they will have to evolve a comprehensive approach to the process of production and distribution, to investment and financial issues, as well as to corporate organization and control. In short, they will need to begin learning how to organize economic resources themselves and evolve what have been called capital strategies

Finding and Using Tests and Instruments for Research

This handout talks about finding and using tests, measurements and other instruments for research. It discusses Mental Measurements Yearbook which offers commercially available instruments. It also shows ways to find “free” instruments that are reliable and valid as well as the articles describing the development and validation of these measures. A webinar based on this handout is available at https://watch.liberty.edu/media/t/1_23mxx0k

Quirt Alerts!

In Vietnam, a soldier\u27s live is saved on point by his heroic dog. Articles, stories, and other compositions in this archive were written by participants in the Mighty Pen Project. The program, developed by author David L. Robbins, and in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, offers veterans and their family members a customized twelve-week writing class, free of charge. The program encourages, supports, and assists participants in sharing their stories and experiences of military experience so both writer and audience may benefit

Breaking New Ground: Pension Fund Bargaining at Eastern

[Excerpt] Traditionally, unions have exercised their economic power through the strike and the boycott to gain collective bargaining agreements and through the day-to-day enforcement of contract provisions. But the rapidly growing mobility of capital and the increased rate of introducing new technologies have increasingly neutralized the effectiveness of labor\u27s fundamental tools. Thus, it is crucial that unions begin to develop new tools to enhance the economic power of workers. This means that labor must redefine its role with respect to the economy and to the process of allocating resources in the society. Increasingly, unions are demanding plant closing protections, a voice in the introduction of new technologies, restrictions on subcontracting, commitments for reinvestment in existing facilities, and job security for current workers

Generating predictions to aid the scientific discovery process

NGLAUBER is a system which models the scientific discovery of qualitative empirical laws. As such, it falls into the category of scientific discovery systems. However, the program can also be viewed as a conceptual clustering system since it forms classes of objects and characterizes these classes. NGLAUBER differs from existing scientific discovery and conceptual clustering systems in a number of ways: It uses an incremental method to group objects into classes; these classes are formed based on the relationships between objects rather than just the attributes of objects; the system describes the relationships between classes rather than simply describing the classes; and most importantly, NGLAUBER proposes experiments by predicting future data. The experiments help the system guide itself through the search for regularities in the data

Ultrasonic Polishing

The ultrasonic polishing process makes use of the high-frequency (ultrasonic) vibrations of an abradable tool which automatically conforms to the work piece and an abrasive slurry to finish surfaces and edges on complex, highly detailed, close tolerance cavities in materials from beryllium copper to carbide. Applications range from critical deburring of guidance system components to removing EDM recast layers from aircraft engine components to polishing molds for forming carbide cutting tool inserts or injection molding plastics. A variety of materials including tool steels, carbides, and even ceramics can be successfully processed. Since the abradable tool automatically conforms to the work piece geometry, the ultrasonic finishing method described offers a number of important benefits in finishing components with complex geometries