And then came complex project management (revised)

The subject of management is renowned for its addiction to fads and fashions. Project Management is no exception. The issue of interest for this paper is the establishment of standards in the area, specifically the 'College of Complex Project Managers' and their 'competency standard for complex project managers'. Both the college and the standard have generated significant interest in the Project Management community. Whilst the need for development of the means to manage complex projects is acknowledged, a critical evaluation show significant flaws in the definition of complex in this case, the process by which the College and its standard have emerged, and the content of the standard. If Project Management is to continue to develop as a profession, it will need an evidence-based approach to the generation of knowledge and standards. The issues raised by the evaluation provide the case for a portfolio of research that extends the existing bodies of knowledge into large-scale complicated (or major) projects. We propose that it would be owned by the practitioner community, rather than focused on one organization. Research questions are proposed that would commence this stream of activity towards an intelligent synthesis of what is required to manage in both complicated and truly complex environments. This is a revised paper previously presented at the 21st IPMA World Congress on Project Management Cracow, Poland

Portfolio Choice and Health Status

This paper analyzes the role that health status plays in household portfolio decisions using data from the Health and Retirement Study. The results indicate that health is a significant predictor of both the probability of owning different types of financial assets and the share of financial wealth held in each asset category. Households in poor health are less likely to hold risky financial assets, other things (including the level of total wealth) being the same. Poor health is associated with a smaller share of financial wealth held in risky assets and a larger share in safe assets. We find no evidence that the relationship between health status and portfolio allocation is driven by third variables' that simultaneously affect health and financial decisions. Further, the relationship between health status and portfolio choice does not appear to operate through the effect of poor health on individuals' attitudes toward risk, their planning horizons, or their health insurance status.

Altruistic Behavior and Habit Formation

This paper examines whether altruistic behavior is habit forming. We take advantage of a data set that includes a rich set of information concerning individuals’ donations of cash and time as adults as well as information about whether they were involved with charitable activities when they were young. The basic premise is that if altruistic behavior when young is a good predictor of such behavior in adulthood, then this is consistent with the notion that altruistic behavior is habit forming. Using U.S. data, we examine both donations of money and time, and find that engaging in charitable behavior when young is a strong predictor of adult altruistic behavior, ceteris paribus. A major issue in the interpretation of this result is that the correlation between youthful and adult altruistic behavior may be due to some third variable that affects both. While it is impossible to rule out such a possibility, we are able to control for family influences that likely could affect lifetime attitudes toward altruism. We find that, even taking this factor into account, altruistic behavior as a youth plays a significant role in explaining adult behavior. This result applies to donations of money and time to a variety of types of non-profit organizations.altruistic behavior, donations, nonprofit fundraising

Deep HST V- and I-Band Observations of Two Globular Clusters in the Halo of M31

We present deep (V ~= 27) V- and I-band stellar photometry of G302 and G312, two globular star clusters in the halo of M31. These data were obtained using the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field/Planetary Camera 2. We find iron abundances of [Fe/H] = -1.85 +/- 0.12 for G302 and [Fe/H] = -0.56 +/- 0.03 for G312, consistent with spectroscopic measurements. The color-magnitude diagrams for each cluster show no evidence for an intermediate-aged population of stars, or a second parameter effect in the morphology of the horizontal branch. G302 shows no evidence for a color gradient but the inner regions of G312 are bluer than the outer regions. G312 shows no evidence of ellipticity or an extended halo of unbound stars. G302 has a projected ellipticity of 0.195 +/- 0.012 with the projected major axis oriented towards the center of M31. G302 also shows evidence of an extended asymmetric stellar halo extending to at least twice the fitted Michie-King tidal radius. The amount of mass beyond the tidal radius of G302 is consistent with the stellar escape rates which have been predicted by N-body simulations of globular clusters in the Galactic tidal field.Comment: 29 pages, 21 Postscript figures, uses aaspp4.sty, to be published in the October 1997 A

The Double Cluster G185 in M31

We have identified a small globular cluster in M31 located approximately 4 arcseconds northwest of the M31 globular cluster G185. While several multiple globular clusters have been observed in the Magellanic Clouds none have been found in the Galaxy or in M31. We estimate the probability of such a chance line-of-sight alignment occuring near the nucleus of M31 to be 0.09 +/- 0.03 and find no obvious indication of any tidal deformation in either cluster, as would be expected if the clusters were interacting. Two-dimensional modelling suggests G185 has a King (1966) [AJ, 71, 64] concentration of c = 1.11 +/- 0.08 while the companion has c = 0.67 +/- 0.17 and is physically smaller than G185. Both objects have integrated dereddened colors similar to those of Galactic globular clusters.Comment: 22 pages, ~1Mb postscript file http://www.astro.ubc.ca/~holland/bib.html/ ftp://nukta.astro.ubc.ca/pub/holland/G185_preprint.ps.

Lending Club’s Note Trading Platform Facade: An Examination of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Lending Secondary Market Inefficiency

The original objective of the study was to monitor and analyze the inefficiencies in Lending Club’s Peer-toPeer (P2P) secondary market, in order to exploit these inefficiencies for a risk-free return. Upon a threemonth examination and analysis of the secondary market, the findings indicate that arbitrage conditions do not exist as a result of the observed volume of the marketplace being vastly lower than initially believed. Only 0.44% of note listing instances on Lending Club’s secondary market over the three-month period resulted in successful trades. As a consequence, investors assume a purported level of liquidity that is never met, thus they may incur a higher level of risk than initially estimated on the primary market at the time of issuance

A powerful test for linearity when the order of integration is unknown [Revised to become No. 07/06 above]

In this paper we propose a test of the null hypothesis of time series linearity against a nonlinear alternative, when uncertainty exists as to whether or not the series contains a unit root. We provide a test statistic that has the same limiting null critical values regardless of whether the series under consideration is generated from a linear I(0) or linear I(1) process, and is consistent against nonlinearity of either form, being asymptotically equivalent to the efficient test in each case. Finite sample simulations show that the new procedure has good size control and offers substantial power gains over the recently proposed robust linearity test of Harvey and Leybourne (2007).Nonlinearity testing; Wald tests; unit root tests; stationarity tests

GM070785 final report

Issued as final reportUnited States. Dept. of Health and Human Service