Constructing and Testing Practical Procedures for Describing a Corporate Culture: The Electric Troublemen

During the 1980s much attention was focused on trying to understand and apply the concept of corporate culture. Scholars and practitioners worked on clarifying the definition of culture as it applies to workplace settings. Scholars adapted the anthropological concepts of culture to fit within the framework of a business organization. Both scholars and practitioners attempted to investigate the cultures of many organizations throughout the business world. Scholars conducted lengthy case studies and used a mixture of qualitative and quantitative techniques. Business world practitioners conducted short studies and used mostly quantitative survey techniques. What was found was that the scholarly approach took too long to perform and the business world practitioner\u27s approach produced very little information about an organization\u27s workplace culture. This research project attempted to apply qualitative research techniques in a way that recognizes the practical limits placed on time, talent, and materials in the business world. More specifically, a model of workplace culture and a procedure for describing and profiling a corporate culture were developed and tested. The model consists of three components: one that helps to identify whether or not an organization has a healthy culture, one that describes the characteristics that make up the content of a culture, and one that classifies a culture according to categories that are useful for comparing one culture to another. The procedure consists of three qualitative data gathering techniques: observation, interview, and historical document analysis; and the analysis procedure involves processing thick description data. The model and the procedure were tested by describing and profiling the subculture of a small group of employees, known as electric troublemen, who work for the San Diego Gas and Electric Company. Data collection and analysis took approximately 360 hours to complete, resulting in a profile that is both interesting and informative

Heuristic procedures for reactive project scheduling.

This paper describes new heuristic reactive project scheduling procedures that may be used to repair resource-constrained roject baseline schedules that suer from multiple activity duration disruptions during project execution.The objective is to minimize the deviations between the baseline schedule and the schedule that is actually realized.We discuss computational results obtained with priority-rule based schedule generation schemes, a sampling approach and a weighted-earliness tardiness heuristic on a set of randomly generated project instances.Project scheduling; Scheduling; Reactive scheduling; Research; Uncertainty; Stability;

Proactive resource allocation heuristics for robust project scheduling.

The well-known deterministic resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) involves the determination of apredictive schedule (baseline schedule or pre-schedule)of the project activities that satisfies the finish-start precedence relations and the renewable resource constraints under the objective of minimizing the project duration. This pre-schedule serves as a baseline for the execution of the project. During execution, however, the project can be subject to several types of disruptions that may disturb the baseline schedule. Management must then rely on a reactive scheduling procedure for revising or reoptimizing the pre-schedule. The objective of our research is to develop procedures for allocating resources to the activities of a given baseline schedule in order to maximize its stability in the presence of activity duration variability. We propose three integer programming based heuristics and one constructive procedure for resource allocation. We derive lower bounds for schedule stability and report on computational results obtained on a set of benchmark problems.Research; Resource allocation; Project scheduling; Heuristics; Scheduling;

Study of tropical cyclone structural evolution, A

Includes bibliographical references.The destructive potential of a tropical cyclone is highly dependent on both the intensity and size of the storm. There has been extensive research done on intensity and intensity change, but far less work has focused on tropical cyclone structure and structural changes. The recent highly active Atlantic tropical seasons reemphasize the need for a better understanding of tropical cyclone structural evolution. This is particularly true of the 2005 season which produced a number of storms, such as Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, that not only became extremely intense, but also grew substantially in size during intensification. In contrast to these giants are the storms such as Hurricanes Charley (2004) and Emily (2005), which reached equal intensity, but remained fairly small in size. The goal of this study is to gain a better understanding of what causes these different structural evolutions in tropical cyclones. The inner core (0-200 km) wind-fields of Atlantic and Eastern Pacific tropical cyclones from 1995-2005 from aircraft reconnaissance flight-level data is used to calculate the low-level inner core kinetic energy. An inner core kinetic energy-intensity relationship is defined which describes the general trend of tropical cyclone inner core kinetic energy (KE) with respect to intensity. However, this mean KE/intensity relationship does not define the evolution of an individual storm. The KE deviations from the mean relationship for each storm are used to determine the cases where a storm is experiencing significant structural changes. The evolution of the KE deviations from the mean with respect to intensity indicates that hurricanes generally either grow and weaken or maintain their intensity, or strengthen but do not grow at the same time. The data is sorted by the state of intensification (intensifying, weakening, or maintaining intensity) and structure change (growing or non-growing), defining six sub-groups. The dynamic, thermodynamic, and internal conditions for the storm sub-groups are analyzed with the aid of statistical testing in order to determine what conditions are significantly different for growing versus non-growing storms in each intensification regime. These results reveal that there are two primary types of growth processes. The first is through eyewall replacement cycles, an internally dominated process, and the second via external forcing from the synoptic environment. As a supplement to this study, a new tropical cyclone classification system based on inner core KE is presented as a complement to the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale.Funding for this research was sponsored by CIRA activities and participation in the GOES Improved Measurement Product Assurance Plan (GIMPAP) under NOAA cooperative agreement NA17RJ1

Atlas of radiation budget measurements from satellites (1962-1970)

December 1974.Includes bibliographical references

When It\u27s Springtime In Virginia

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/2495/thumbnail.jp

Radiation measurements from polar and geosynchronous satellites

June 1978.Includes bibliographical references.This is the Annual report for period 1 November 1976-31 October 1977 and the Final report, 10 October 1970-31 July 1978 for National Aeronatuics and Space Administratin grant NGR-06-002-102.National Aeronatuics and Space Administratin grant NGR-06-002-10

GCIP water and energy budget synthesis (WEBS)

As part of the World Climate Research Program\u27s (WCRPs) Global Energy and Water-Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Continental-scale International Project (GCIP), a preliminary water and energy budget synthesis (WEBS) was developed for the period 1996–1999 from the “best available” observations and models. Besides this summary paper, a companion CD-ROM with more extensive discussion, figures, tables, and raw data is available to the interested researcher from the GEWEX project office, the GAPP project office, or the first author. An updated online version of the CD-ROM is also available at http://ecpc.ucsd.edu/gcip/webs.htm/. Observations cannot adequately characterize or “close” budgets since too many fundamental processes are missing. Models that properly represent the many complicated atmospheric and near-surface interactions are also required. This preliminary synthesis therefore included a representative global general circulation model, regional climate model, and a macroscale hydrologic model as well as a global reanalysis and a regional analysis. By the qualitative agreement among the models and available observations, it did appear that we now qualitatively understand water and energy budgets of the Mississippi River Basin. However, there is still much quantitative uncertainty. In that regard, there did appear to be a clear advantage to using a regional analysis over a global analysis or a regional simulation over a global simulation to describe the Mississippi River Basin water and energy budgets. There also appeared to be some advantage to using a macroscale hydrologic model for at least the surface water budgets