6,406 research outputs found
Determinants of salary in nonprofit organizations: A study of executive compensation in symphony orchestras
This thesis presents the development of a demand equation for symphony orchestras and a three equation, simultaneous model examining factors which influence nonprofit executive compensation. Results from the demand equation demonstrate that nonprofit orchestras operate in the inelastic portion of the demand curve. Thus, ticket sales generate negative marginal revenues and attendance is increased at the expense of profit. If total revenue is less than total cost, the orchestra must be subsidized by contributions from private and public sectors. The compensation model indicates that salary is positively correlated with the ability to increase contributions and improve organizational quality. Therefore, administrators seeking to enhance income and marketability would do well to focus their energies on these two critical areas. Additionally, private contributions and quality respond positively to executive pay. Organizations seeking to enhance their reputation by increasing their level of service will bid up the salary of superior managers
Principles of protein structure: An established Internetâbased course in structural biology
The Department of Crystallography at Birkbeck College, London, UK, has been running a oneâyear, partâtime accredited graduate course, âPrinciples of Protein Structureâ, entirely over the Internet since 1996. Students on this course learn the basic principles of the increasingly important subject of structural biology using software programs such as Rasmol and Chime to visualize and manipulate molecular structures in three dimensions. They interact with their tutors, based at Birkbeck, using email and textâbased teleconferencing, and can test their knowledge with multiple choice quizzes on the Web. Over 200 students from thirty countries registered for this course in the last four years. Forty, from central and eastern Europe, were supported by bursaries from the Open Society Institute. The course has been well received by students and its success led us to introduce a similar course in protein crystallography
Hybrid Channel Pre-Inversion and Interference Alignment Strategies
In this paper we consider strategies for MIMO interference channels which
combine the notions of interference alignment and channel pre-inversion. Users
collaborate to form data-sharing groups, enabling them to clear interference
within a group, while interference alignment is employed to clear interference
between groups. To improve the capacity of our schemes at finite SNR, we
propose that the groups of users invert their subchannel using a regularized
Tikhonov inverse. We provide a new sleeker derivation of the optimal Tikhonov
parameter, and use random matrix theory to provide an explicit formula for the
SINR as the size of the system increases, which we believe is a new result. For
every possible grouping of K = 4 users each with N = 5 antennas, we completely
classify the degrees of freedom available to each user when using such hybrid
schemes, and construct explicit interference alignment strategies which
maximize the sum DoF. Lastly, we provide simulation results which compute the
ergodic capacity of such schemes.Comment: Submitted to ICC 201
Reversing the Null: Regulation, Deregulation, and the Power of Ideas
It has been said that deregulation was an important source of the recent financial crisis. It may be more accurate, however, to say that a deregulatory mindset was an important source of the crisis - a mindset that, to a very significant extent, grew out of profound changes in academic thinking about the role of government. As scholars of political economy quietly shifted their focus from market failure to government failure over the second half of the twentieth century, they set the stage for a revolution in both government and markets, the full ramifications of which are still only beginning to be understood. This intellectual sea-change generated some positive effects, but also some negative ones, including (it seems) an excessively negative impression of the capacity of government to address problems in the marketplace. Today, as we consider the need for new regulation, particularly in the wake of the financial crisis, another fundamental shift in academic thinking about the role of government may be required - involving nothing less than a reversal of the prevailing null hypothesis in the study of political economy.
Libre culture: meditations on free culture
Libre Culture is the essential expression of the free culture/copyleft movement. This anthology, brought together here for the first time, represents the early groundwork of Libre Society thought. Referring to the development of creativity and ideas, capital works to hoard and privatize the knowledge and meaning of what is created. Expression becomes monopolized, secured within an artificial market-scarcity enclave and finally presented as a novelty on the culture industry in order to benefit cloistered profit motives. In the way that physical resources such as forests or public services are free, Libre Culture argues for the freeing up of human ideas and expression from copyright bulwarks in all forms
The influence of density stratification and multiple nonlinearities on solar torsional oscillations
Analyses of recent helioseismic data have produced ample evidence for
substantial dynamical variation of the differential rotation within the solar
convection zone. Given the inevitable difficulties in resolving the precise
nature of variations at deeper layers, much effort has recently gone into
determining theoretically the expected modes of behaviour, using nonlinear
dynamo models. Two important limitations of these models are that they have so
far included only one form of nonlinearity, and as yet they have not taken into
account the density stratification in the solar convection zone. Here we
address both of these issues by studying the effects of including density
stratification, as well as including an alpha--quenching nonlinearity in
addition to the previously studied effects of the Lorentz force on the
differential rotation. We find that observationally important features found in
the earlier uniform density models remain qualitatively unchanged, although
there are quantitative differences. This is important as it provides more
realistic theoretical predictions to be compared with and guide observations,
especially in the deeper regions where the uncertainties in the inversions are
larger. However the presence of an effective alpha-quenching nonlinearity
significantly reduces the amplitudes of the oscillations.Comment: 8 pages, 13 figures; to appear in Astronomy and Astrophysic
Dynamo generated magnetic configurations in accretion discs and the nature of quasi-periodic oscillations in accreting binary systems
Magnetic fields are important for accretion disc structure. Magnetic fields
in a disc system may be transported with the accreted matter. They can be
associated with either the central body and/or jet, and be fossil or dynamo
excited in situ. We consider dynamo excitation of magnetic fields in accretion
discs of accreting binary systems in an attempt to clarify possible
configurations of dynamo generated magnetic fields. We first model the entire
disc with realistic radial extent and thickness using an alpha-quenching
non-linearity. We then study the simultaneous effect of feedback from the
Lorentz force from the dynamo-generated field. We perform numerical simulations
in the framework of a relatively simple mean-field model which allows the
generation of global magnetic configurations. We explore a range of
possibilities for the dynamo number, and find quadrupolar-type solutions with
irregular temporal oscillations that might be compared to observed rapid
luminosity fluctuations. The dipolar symmetry models with have
lobes of strong toroidal field adjacent to the rotation axis that could be
relevant to jet launching phenomena. We have explored and extended the
solutions known for thin accretion discs.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figure
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