Sources and Management of Conflict in Blended Organizations

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)The integration of nonstandard (temporary) workers into an organization is called a “blended workforce,” and such an arrangement is a breeding ground for potential conflict. Until very recently, much of the research on nonstandard workers has been limited to exploring those in low-wage positions requiring limited skills and the detriments of such working arrangements. However, with advances in technology that allow working from remote locations and the desire of firms to more quickly adapt to changes in the market, the role of high-skill, high-wage nonstandard workers is steadily growing. Pondy (1967) proposed that conflict episodes are composed of five possible stages: latent, perceived, felt, manifest and the aftermath. These conflict stages provided the framework for the consideration of conflict in blended organizations. Through an extensive literature review of nonstandard workers, this research determined six potential areas of latent conflict in blended organizations. Next, the research determined if those areas of latent conflict move into advanced stages of conflict within blended organizations that integrate high-end nonstandard workers. Finally, the research explored how those conflicts that emerge from the use of a blended workforce are managed

Deadline Prediction Scheduling based on Benefits

This paper describes a scheduling algorithm that composes a scheduling plan which is able to predict the completion time of the arriving tasks. This is done by performing CPU booking. This prediction is used to establish a temporal commitment with the client that invokes the execution of the task. This kind of scheduler is very useful in scenarios where Service-Oriented Computing is deployed and the execution time is used as a parameter for QoS. This scheduler is part of an architecture that is based on the Distributed Goal-Oriented Computing paradigm, which allows agents to express their own goals and to reach them by means of service compositions. Moreover, the scheduler is also able to prioritize those tasks which provide greater benefits to the OS. In this work, the scheduler has been designed in several iterations and tested by means of a set of experiments that compare the scheduler algorithm with a representative set of scheduling algorithms. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work is supported by the TIN2009-13839-C03-01 project of the Spanish government, PROMETEO/2008/051 project, FEDER funds and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 under grant CSD2007-00022.Palanca Cámara, J.; Navarro Llácer, M.; García-Fornes, A.; Julian Inglada, VJ. (2013). Deadline Prediction Scheduling based on Benefits. Future Generation Computer Systems. 29(1):61-73. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2012.05.007S617329

Mental Disorder Recovery Correlated with Centralities and Interactions on an Online Social Network

Recent research has established both a theoretical basis and strong empirical evidence that effective social behavior plays a beneficial role in the maintenance of physical and psychological well-being of people. To test whether social behavior and well-being are also associated in online communities, we studied the correlations between the recovery of patients with mental disorders and their behaviors in online social media. As the source of the data related to the social behavior and progress of mental recovery, we used PatientsLikeMe (PLM), the world's first open-participation research platform for the development of patient-centered health outcome measures. We first constructed an online social network structure based on patient-to-patient ties among 200 patients obtained from PLM. We then characterized patients' online social activities by measuring the numbers of "posts and views" and "helpful marks" each patient obtained. The patients' recovery data were obtained from their self-reported status information that was also available on PLM. We found that some node properties (in-degree, eigenvector centrality and PageRank) and the two online social activity measures were significantly correlated with patients' recovery. Furthermore, we re-collected the patients' recovery data two months after the first data collection. We found significant correlations between the patients' social behaviors and the second recovery data, which were collected two months apart. Our results indicated that social interactions in online communities such as PLM were significantly associated with the current and future recoveries of patients with mental disorders.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables; accepted for publication in Peer

Meaning, nature and communication

One of the central endeavors in contemporary philosophy has been to arrive at some clear understanding of the nature of communication. This concern has been motivated, in part, by the use made of facts about general features of language in traditional philosophical arguments, to conclusions about the ultimate structures of reality. In my thesis I have attempted to advance a certain precise view of communication. I begin by distinguishing between the process of communication and the corresponding concept. I assume that a useful strategy for orienting oneself with respect to the ontological question concerning the nature of the process, is to delineate, in a formal manner, those conditions (in some sense internalized) which explain how we are able to identify and agree upon a wide range of cases as involving or not communication. For it seems plausible to suppose that how we in this fundamental way conceptualize some process has something to do with its true nature; if only because the concept we form must provide an accurate means for dealing with that aspect of reality which it discriminates. In essence, communication consists of some speaker's meaning something by some utterance, and his audience's subsequent understanding. Since to understand someone is just to know what he meant, I suggest that the crucial concept to be clarified is that of meaning--in particular, the concept of someone's meaning something by his utterance. Following the precedent of H. P. Grice, I call this the "nonnatural" sense of meaning. Two closely connected concepts, both marked by the use of the verb "mean", are those of "intentional meaning" (where we speak of someone's meaning to accomplish something by something he does) and "natural meaning" (where we speak of [the fact of the existence of] some event or state of affairs meaning that some other event or state of affairs is [was or will be] the case). Both of these more general concepts have been argued for in the literature as providing suitable bases for an analysis of the concept of nonnatural meaning. My procedure involves utilizing successful features from each type of analysis in order to improve upon the other, until some fairly unified result is obtained. This result is captured by the condition that nonnatural meaning must involve an intent on the part of the speaker to provide his audience with knowledge of a very special intention on his (the speaker's) part. One apparent advantage of the naturalistic over the intentionalist analysis of nonnatural meaning is that it seems to lend support to a scientific approach to the process of communication. However, I argue that even on the opposing, mentalistic outlook on the process—which takes man to also inhabit a realm apart from the reach of natural necessity—it is a conceptual fact that certain factual presuppositions must be satisfied in any world before certain higher-level concepts can have application in that world. In the special case of communication, it is necessary (in this a priori sense) that a certain regularity exist between certain utterances and dispositional states in the speaker before the notion of non-natural meaning (and hence of communication) can have any applicability. And this regularity is likely to be of sufficient frequency to justify a scientific, as well as an artificially simplified, approach to communication (and hence to language), as the field-linguist adopts in his work. In this way I have tried to show how it can be that certain intensional concepts which are most intimately bound up with the concept of language (e.g., the concepts of non-natural meaning and intending), are logically dependent upon —-those more extensional concepts with which science is most comfortable (e.g., the concepts of evidence and behavior); and this is possible without requiring the postulation of some analytic (or transformational) connection existing between these two levels of concepts, as most recent meaning-theorists have suggested.Arts, Faculty ofPhilosophy, Department ofGraduat

Transfinite Sequences of Axiom Systems for Set Theory

71 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1967.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD