Zhou Xun (ed), The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962: A Documentary History,

This collection of archival documents is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on the Great Leap Forward famine that has appeared in the last few years. Professor Zhou Xun spent four years collecting a thousand archival documents. She chose 121 for this book. They came from six provincial Party archives and five city or county archives. They are listed in an Index of Documents together with dates and identification numbers. Some are presented in full; most are excerpted. Quite a few..

Centers of Excellence: Management Within Multinational Corporations

As organizations expand geographically, and especially when expanding globally, they often find it necessary, or more effective, to develop Centers of Excellence (CoE). If properly structured these centers can reduce cost, improve efficiency, leverage organizational assets, and often improve levels of organizational innovation. This is the next installment in a series of articles started in the first issues of the JMI exploring these very challenging issues (Coughlan & Bernstein, 2015). In this installment the authors will specifically address issues surrounding leadership, integrated governance model, standardization, continuous improvement, business continuity, and managing through hard target metrics. This article assumes that the CoE is past its initial startup phase and it operating at a full level of scale. In addition, this paper is focused on multi-national corporations (MNCs) where CoEs are internally operated – not outsourced to third parties - and more specifically on knowledge based CoEs

The Process Recombinator: A Tool for Generating New Business Process Ideas

A critical need for many organizations in the next century will be the ability to quickly develop innovative business processes to take advantage of rapidly changing technologies and markets. Current process design tools and methodologies, however, are very resource-intensive and provide little support for generating (as opposed to merely recording) new design alternatives. This paper describes the Process Recombinator, a novel tool for generating new business process ideas by recombining elements from a richly structured repository of knowledge about business processes. The key contribution of the work is the technical demonstration of how such a repository can be used to automatically generate a wide range of innovative process designs. We have also informally evaluated the Process Recombinator in several field studies, which are briefly described here as well. Keywords: process innovation, business process repository, BPR, business process design 1. THE CHALLENGE: DESIG..

The regionalization of emergency medical services : a strategy for planning and intervention

Thesis. 1975. M.C.P.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.Bibliography: leaves 186-189.by Shelley F. Bernstein, E. Michael Paul Thomas.M.C.P

Balancing Producer Fairness and Efficiency via Prior-Weighted Rating System Design

Online marketplaces use rating systems to promote the discovery of high-quality products. However, these systems also lead to high variance in producers' economic outcomes: a new producer who sells high-quality items, may unluckily receive one low rating early on, negatively impacting their future popularity. We investigate the design of rating systems that balance the goals of identifying high-quality products (efficiency) and minimizing the variance in economic outcomes of producers of similar quality (individual producer fairness). We show that there is a trade-off between these two goals: rating systems that promote efficiency are necessarily less individually fair to producers. We introduce prior-weighted rating systems as an approach to managing this trade-off. Informally, the system we propose sets a system-wide prior for the quality of an incoming product; subsequently, the system updates that prior to a posterior for each producer's quality based on user-generated ratings over time. We show theoretically that in markets where products accrue reviews at an equal rate, the strength of the rating system's prior determines the operating point on the identified trade-off: the stronger the prior, the more the marketplace discounts early ratings data (increasing individual fairness), but the slower the platform is in learning about true item quality (so efficiency suffers). We further analyze this trade-off in a responsive market where customers make decisions based on historical ratings. Through calibrated simulations, we show that the choice of prior strength mediates the same efficiency-consistency trade-off in this setting. Overall, we demonstrate that by tuning the prior as a design choice in a prior-weighted rating system, platforms can be intentional about the balance between efficiency and producer fairness.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, submitted to TheWebConf 202