The RoboFlag SURF competition: results, analysis, and future work

The culmination of the 2002 RoboFlag Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program, jointly operated between California Institute of Technology and Cornell University, was a final competition between two teams of three undergraduate researchers. After ten weeks of preparation, Team Pasadena defeated Team Ithaca in two of the three final games. This paper provides the detailed results of the competition, an analysis of the competition, and reviews the future work

Variation in Organic Standards Prior to the National Organic Program

Interest in establishing nationally uniform certification, labeling, and management standards for organic products grew out of concern that the existence of multiple standards led to consumer and supply chain confusion about, and lack of confidence in, these products. The National Organic Program Final Rule, issued in December 2000, is the result of this interest. We analyze the certification system that was in place prior to the new national rule to evaluate the extent of differences between certification standards and how the national rule is likely to impact the market for organic products. Our analysis suggests that most differences among US certification standards were minor. Also, the most important impacts of the national standard may be in facilitating trade in ingredients and products certified by different certifiers, increasing buyer confidence, and facilitating exports. However, the national rule may decrease the ability of organic certifiers and consumers to place differing emphasis on the multiple goals of organic production and may decrease the flexibility of organic standards to respond to changing market conditions, including new technologies.organic agriculture, organic certification standards, organic labeling, organic market, Agribusiness, Marketing,

Strategic Management and the Internal Organization of Food Marketing Firms

Agribusiness, Industrial Organization,

Restructuring's Effect on Related and Unrelated Diversification Among Top Food Manufacturing Firms in the 1980s

Corporate restructuring during the 1980s is argued to have focused on improving firm performance by increasing related and decreasing unrelated diversification. The restructuring patterns of top food manufacturing firms do not support this; instead, much of the restructuring appears to have been driven by the pursuit of stronger market positions. TheAgribusiness, Industrial Organization,

Identifying Precursors To Student Defection

Recently, student retention has surfaced as a priority for many academic institutions.  While institutions regard retaining students as important, little has been done to create a system that helps institutions “flag potential defectors” prior to leaving.  By identifying “at risk” students, intervention steps can be taken to reduce the likelihood of defecting.  The author proposes that institutions develop data mining procedures, similar to those used in business, to identify potential defectors.  This data should include both “hard” and “soft” predictors of student defection.  An added benefit of this data is that it can be used by institutional advancement, once students become alumni, to improve fundraising efforts by enabling the development of “one-to-one” fundraising/marketing programs.&nbsp

Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field

The first book to test the claim that the emerging field of Digital Humanities is interdisciplinary and also examines the boundary work of establishing and sustaining a new field of stud

Inflight estimation of gyro noise

A method is described and demonstrated for estimating single-axis gyro noise levels in terms of the Farrenkopf model parameters. This is accomplished for the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) by comparing gyro-propagated attitudes with less accurate single-frame solutions and fitting the squared differences to a third-order polynomial in time. Initial results are consistent with the gyro specifications, and these results are used to determine limits on the duration of batches used to determine attitude. Sources of error are discussed, and guidelines for a more elegant implementation, as part of a batch estimator or filter, are included for future work

Parallelism and evolution in transnational policy transfer networks: the case of Sino-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP)

This paper examines the policy transfer process and outcomes outside the occidental context. It extends the voluntary transnational policy transfer framework with an evolutionary perspective and a scalar understanding of space and power at the subnational level. When the Sino-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), a government-to-government collaboration in promoting industrial development, was studied, it was revealed that two parallel policy transfer networks were developed in the early days of the SIP, which were embedded in different scales of governance and pursuing divergent targets. Their relationship affected the policy transfer outcomes for the SIP, and reveals the important governance and temporal dimensions in transnational policy transfers