Economic Strength and Micropolitan Statistical Areas: Looking Beyond Generalities

Facility location decisions serve an important role in setting up efficient and cost-effective supply chains. While metropolitan areas may appear an obvious choice for many companies, nonmetropolitan areas deserve consideration. In the past, nonmetropolitan areas have been broadly classified as “rural” with reports of economic decline. This research looks beyond the general category of nonmetropolitan by dividing the area into micropolitan statistical areas and non-core statistical areas. The authors use U.S. Census data from the years 2010 to 2016 to analyze changes in population, median household income, retail employment, and retail salaries in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. Companies can use this more refined information approach to help identify specific counties outside metropolitan statistical areas that demonstrate growth and may provide suitable facility locations

How Politics Affects Practitioner Attitudes of Marketing Faculty Interns

Marketing student internships are widely discussed in the literature, yet little has been published regarding the value of marketing faculty internships. In applied disciplines like marketing, faculty internships can bridge experience gaps between theory and practice and help provide critical information to keep the curriculum current. Unfortunately, politics can manifest itself as one barrier to academic engagement with the business community. To explore this potential problem, we first test a model that measures the influence political party combined with political ideology has on three Contempt-Anger-Disgust (CAD) outcome measures common in psychology literature. We model a statistically significant political backdrop that may present challenges to the development of marketing faculty internships in practitioner settings in the first section. The second part of this analysis presents crosstabulated results of practitioner opinions for a series of eighteen items remaining in our survey. Based on our results, marketing faculty members should consider benefits that can accrue from internship opportunities in the private sector. Despite some doubt and concern, and regardless of their individual politics, approximately seven out of ten practitioners express positive views toward having a marketing internship for faculty members at their workplace

Escape for Boone & Crocket

Eber Crocket is the owner of Boone & Crocket Trapper Supply (B&C). He feels like the environmental forces that are impacting his business are like a trap slowing closing on him. He is considering ideas to improve his store’s profitability. Demand for furs as fashion goods is a multi-million dollar industry. Twenty percent of this demand is met by wild fur which is harvested by trappers. Trapping suppliers serve as the middleman between small individual trappers and auction houses. These auction houses collect the raw fur pelts from trappers and trapping stores and hold them until one of their auctions. Members of the international fashion community are the principle buyers of wild fur. These firms are involved in the tanning, finishing and design work needed to turn a fur pelt into a finished garment. The fur industry is impacted by many environmental forces. Among them, sociocultural, regulatory and economic forces are key. Boone & Crocket Trapping Supply is small family-owned business located in central Minnesota It offers a wide selection of trapping-related goods and services. The majority of B&Cs profits come from the sale of traps, baits and other goods. The remaining profit comes from fur handing and auction fur sales. Your friend Eber wants your perspective on some of the new product and service ideas he is considering to make B&C more profitable. His ideas are to produce trapping baits, expand the condition of furs B&C buys, differentiate the store’s product line, enter the nuisance animal control business, or become involved in trapper’s education

How Regional Employment in the U.S. Automobile Industry Influences Consumer Ethnocentrism

The past three decades lay witness to major geographical evolution of the automobile industry in the United States. This study analyzes exactly how CETSCALE scores differ among a population that is currently either more or less economically impacted by automobile production and marketing. The analysis presented in this study illustrates a direct correlation between ethnocentric dispositions among consumers and employment opportunities in the automobile sector across U.S. Census Bureau geographical regions and divisions in each region. Comprehensive statistical details are provided that arguably demonstrate a change in what the phrase “Made in America” means, at least where automobile production is concerned

Bandit Models of Human Behavior: Reward Processing in Mental Disorders

Drawing an inspiration from behavioral studies of human decision making, we propose here a general parametric framework for multi-armed bandit problem, which extends the standard Thompson Sampling approach to incorporate reward processing biases associated with several neurological and psychiatric conditions, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), addiction, and chronic pain. We demonstrate empirically that the proposed parametric approach can often outperform the baseline Thompson Sampling on a variety of datasets. Moreover, from the behavioral modeling perspective, our parametric framework can be viewed as a first step towards a unifying computational model capturing reward processing abnormalities across multiple mental conditions.Comment: Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI-1

Use of Equivalent Relative Utility (ERU) to Evaluate Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Rule-Out Devices

We investigated the use of equivalent relative utility (ERU) to evaluate the effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled rule-out devices that use AI to identify and autonomously remove non-cancer patient images from radiologist review in screening mammography.We reviewed two performance metrics that can be used to compare the diagnostic performance between the radiologist-with-rule-out-device and radiologist-without-device workflows: positive/negative predictive values (PPV/NPV) and equivalent relative utility (ERU). To demonstrate the use of the two evaluation metrics, we applied both methods to a recent US-based study that reported an improved performance of the radiologist-with-device workflow compared to the one without the device by retrospectively applying their AI algorithm to a large mammography dataset. We further applied the ERU method to a European study utilizing their reported recall rates and cancer detection rates at different thresholds of their AI algorithm to compare the potential utility among different thresholds. For the study using US data, neither the PPV/NPV nor the ERU method can conclude a significant improvement in diagnostic performance for any of the algorithm thresholds reported. For the study using European data, ERU values at lower AI thresholds are found to be higher than that at a higher threshold because more false-negative cases would be ruled-out at higher threshold, reducing the overall diagnostic performance. Both PPV/NPV and ERU methods can be used to compare the diagnostic performance between the radiologist-with-device workflow and that without. One limitation of the ERU method is the need to measure the baseline, standard-of-care relative utility (RU) value for mammography screening in the US. Once the baseline value is known, the ERU method can be applied to large US datasets without knowing the true prevalence of the dataset

Effective Electromagnetic Lagrangian at Finite Temperature and Density in the Electroweak Model

Using the exact propagators in a constant magnetic field, the effective electromagnetic Lagrangian at finite temperature and density is calculated to all orders in the field strength B within the framework of the complete electroweak model, in the weak coupling limit. The partition function and free energy are obtained explicitly and the finite temperature effective coupling is derived in closed form. Some implications of this result, potentially interesting to astrophysics and cosmology, are discussed.Comment: 14 pages, Revtex