DO SURVEYS OVERSTATE PUBLIC CONCERNS?

Because the item, "How concerned are you about...?" asks respondentsto indicate their level of concern about an issue, some respondentsmay sense it assumes they are concerned or should be concernedabout the issue. Using a filter question to first determineif people are concerned about the issue before asking for theirdegree of concern may help solve this problem. To test thishypothesis, a split-ballot experiment was embedded in a nationalrandom digit dialing telephone survey on food-related issues.For the four items included in the experiment, the group receivingthe filter versions of the questions gave roughly double thepercentages of "not concerned" responses as the group receivingstandard items, and the filter group also gave fewer responsesat the upper end of the response scale.     

GLOBAL JOB SHOP SCHEDULING WITH A GENETIC ALGORITHM

This paper describes a global job shop scheduling procedure that uses a genetic algorithm to find a good schedule. Unlike previously considered algorithms, this procedure has been implemented in the scheduling system for a manufacturing facility and has led to improved scheduling. This facility is a semiconductor test area. The test area is a job shop and has sequence-dependent setup times at some operations. The concern of management is to meet their customer due dates and to increase throughput. This requires the coordination of many resources, a task beyond the ability of simple dispatching rules. We discuss a centralized procedure that can find a good schedule through the use of a detailed scheduling model and a genetic algorithm that searches over combinations of dispatching rules. We discuss our effort in developing a system that models the shop, creates schedules for the test area personnel, and makes a number of contributions to test area management.     

THE MORAL COSTS OF NASTINESS

We introduce two variants of the one‐shot joy‐of‐destruction minigame (mini‐JOD). Two players are endowed with the same amount of money. They simultaneously decide whether or not to reduce the other player's payoff at an own cost. In one treatment there was a probability that nature would destroy the opponent's money anyway. We test whether this feature reduces the moral costs of nastiness, and find that destruction rates rise significantly, despite the absence of strategic reasons. (JEL C72, C91, D03)     

Tamil diaspora and the political spaces of second‐generation activism in Switzerland

In this article, we study the emergence of the political spaces of activism of second‐generation Swiss Tamils resulting from a critical event – the suffering of Tamils during and after the final battle in early 2009 of a civil war in northern Sri Lanka that had lasted for decades. We contend that we can explain the geographies of newly emerging second‐generation activism committed to achieving Tamil Eelam through two factors. These are first, this generation's multiple senses of belonging both to Switzerland and to the Tamil ‘nation’ and, second, the way a specific politics of affect remoulded second‐generation identities because the pain of witnessing the brutality of war and suffering of Tamils occurred concurrently with a perceived lack of interest from their ‘new home’ (Switzerland). The combination of these factors made them want to acknowledge their Tamil ‘roots’ and encouraged them to become politically active. Consequently, these second‐generation activists primarily sought to engage with their host society – to awaken it from its indifference to the suffering of Tamils and from its passivity in taking action on an international level. We thereby witness the emerging of a new type of Tamil activism in Switzerland, which is firmly located in and bound to the host country.