The Global Call Center Report: International Perspectives on Management and Employment (Executive Summary)

[Excerpt] This report is the first large scale international study of call center management and employment practices across all regions of the globe – including Asia, Africa, South America, North America, and Europe. Covering almost 2,500 centers in 17 countries, this survey provides a detailed account of the similarities and differences in operations across widely diverse national contexts and cultures. The centers in the survey include a total of 475,000 call center employees

How does customer affiliative behaviour shape the outcomes of employee emotion regulation? A daily diary study of supermarket checkout operators

Few studies have examined how customer behaviour shapes the outcomes of employees’ emotion regulation. Drawing on existing literature, this article tests two alternative models of customer affiliative behaviour (e.g. smiling, engaging in short conversation), employee emotion regulation (surface acting, deep acting) and employee outcomes (emotional exhaustion, objective task performance). In one model, customer affiliative behaviour is a mechanism that mediates the relationship between employee emotion regulation and outcomes, and in the other model customer affiliative behaviour moderates this relationship. The models were tested on data drawn from a daily diary study of 49 supermarket checkout operators and store performance records. The findings from multilevel analyses make a significant contribution to understanding how a key part of the social context during service interactions (i.e. customer affiliative behaviour) is a mechanism and moderator of employee emotion regulation. Results show that the effects of deep and surface acting on employee well-being are mediated by customer affiliative behaviour, and that relationship between surface acting and task performance is mediated by customer affiliative behaviour and emotional exhaustion. In addition, customer affiliative behaviour moderated the relationship between deep acting and emotional exhaustion, and the indirect effect of deep acting on task performance through emotional exhaustion.</jats:p

Violent Crimes and Known Associates: The Residual Clause of the Armed Career Criminal Act

Confusion reigns in federal courts over whether crimes qualify as “violent felonies” for purposes of the Armed Career Criminal Act (“ACCA”). The ACCA requires a fifteenyear minimum sentence for felons convicted of possessing a firearm who have three prior convictions for violent felonies. Many offenders receive the ACCA’s mandatory minimum sentence of fifteen years based on judges’ guesses that their prior crimes could be committed in a violent manner—instead of based on the statutory crimes for which they were actually convicted. Offenders who do not deserve a minimum sentence of fifteen years may receive it anyway. The courts’ application of the ACCA is also underinclusive. Although the ACCA defines “violent felony” to include all crimes “involving conduct that presents a serious potential risk of bodily injury to another,” a 2008 Supreme Court decision has drastically narrowed the so-called residual clause. Begay v. United States held that crimes fall under the residual clause only if they are “purposeful, violent, and aggressive” as a matter of law. This imprecise, extra-statutory formula has resulted in the exclusion of some seriously risky crimes of recklessness and negligence, and created tension with the nearly identical “crime of violence” definition in the career offender sentencing guideline. This Article is the first to survey ACCA jurisprudence after Begay and the Court’s 2009 decision in Chambers v. United States and to detail the conflict between these decisions, the text of the ACCA, and the Court’s prior precedent. This Article offers lower courts a way to apply the ACCA’s residual clause with greater respect for the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial, the statutory text, and precedent. First, courts should narrowly construe Begay’s requirement of “purposeful” conduct to exclude strict liability crimes from the residual clause but include crimes of negligence and recklessness. Second, courts should read Begay’s “aggressive” requirement as a rhetorical flourish without any meaningful distinction from its “violent” requirement. Third, despite Begay’s apparent invitation to do otherwise, courts should strictly follow the “categorical approach” as set forth in Taylor v. United States. The net result of these three steps would be a greater faithfulness to the text of the ACCA: courts applying the residual clause would include only those crimes whose elements require violent conduct while excluding those crimes whose elements do not require violence or any mens rea

Temperature Effects on Integral Abutment Bridges During Final Construction Stages

This study of the integral abutment type bridge was based exclusively on the design used by the South Dakota Department of Highways. The design utilizes an HP10 x 42 steel bearing pile field welded to each bridge girder. To secure proper interaction between the concrete abutment and the steel girder, shear studs or a small stiffener are shop-welded to the girder web on a line coinciding with the eventual center line of the integral abutment which is two feet wide. Reinforced holes are also located in the girder web near the interior face of the integral abutment to accommodate shear bars orientated at 45 degrees with the plane of the web. Their function is similar to that of the previously mentioned shear studs or small stiffener. The main objective of this experimental project was to investigate and evaluate the effects of thermal movements on an integral abutment type bridge during the final stages of construction. This study is a continuation of the research carried out by Mumtaz B. Sarsam. Particular attention was given to the evaluation of the resultant state of stress in the end portion of the girder near and contained within the integral abutment, the upper portion of the steel bearing piles, and in selected locations on the concrete abutment. The vertical forces created within the span because of the rotation of the integral abutment were noted. Emphasis was also placed upon the action of the backfill and the resistance that it offered to the simulated thermal movements of the integral abutment type bridge

TTVFast: An efficient and accurate code for transit timing inversion problems

Transit timing variations (TTVs) have proven to be a powerful technique for confirming Kepler planet candidates, for detecting non-transiting planets, and for constraining the masses and orbital elements of multi-planet systems. These TTV applications often require the numerical integration of orbits for computation of transit times (as well as impact parameters and durations); frequently tens of millions to billions of simulations are required when running statistical analyses of the planetary system properties. We have created a fast code for transit timing computation, TTVFast, which uses a symplectic integrator with a Keplerian interpolator for the calculation of transit times (Nesvorny et al. 2013). The speed comes at the expense of accuracy in the calculated times, but the accuracy lost is largely unnecessary, as transit times do not need to be calculated to accuracies significantly smaller than the measurement uncertainties on the times. The time step can be tuned to give sufficient precision for any particular system. We find a speed-up of at least an order of magnitude relative to dynamical integrations with high precision using a Bulirsch-Stoer integrator.Comment: Submitted to ApJ. Our code is available in both C and Fortran at: http://github.com/kdeck/TTVFast . If you download this version, please check back after the referee process for a possibly updated versio

Trans-Neptunian Objects with Hubble Space Telescope ACS/WFC

We introduce a novel search technique that can identify trans-neptunian objects in three to five exposures of a pointing within a single Hubble Space Telescope orbit. The process is fast enough to allow the discovery of candidates soon after the data are available. This allows sufficient time to schedule follow up observations with HST within a month. We report the discovery of 14 slow-moving objects found within 5\circ of the ecliptic in archival data taken with the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys. The luminosity function of these objects is consistent with previous ground-based and space-based results. We show evidence that the size distribution of both high and low inclination populations is similar for objects smaller than 100 km, as expected from collisional evolution models, while their size distribution differ for brighter objects. We suggest the two populations formed in different parts of the protoplanetary disk and after being dynamically mixed have collisionally evolved together. Among the objects discovered there is an equal mass binary with an angular separation ~ 0."53.Comment: 16 page, 10 figures, accepted by Ap