A comparative study of U.S. and Iraqi students

This study uses a sample comprised of U.S. students and Iraqi students to determine if differences occur over ethical perceptions based on cultural/demographic issues. Irrespective of demographics, the results of this study indicate significant cultural differences between Iraqi students and American students with regard to selected ethical issues concerning graduate education. Specifically the differences occurred in the students' perceptions of winning is everything, selling one's soul, logic before emotion, and pander to professors. Iraqi students consistently viewed these beliefs as more necessary for success in their graduate education than did their American counterparts.     

Approximation Algorithms for Quadratic Programming

We consider the problem of approximating the global minimum of a general quadratic program (QP) with n variables subject to m ellipsoidal constraints. For m=1, we rigorously show that an -minimizer, where error (0, 1), can be obtained in polynomial time, meaning that the number of arithmetic operations is a polynomial in n, m, and log(1/). For m 2, we present a polynomial-time (1- )-approximation algorithm as well as a semidefinite programming relaxation for this problem. In addition, we present approximation algorithms for solving QP under the box constraints and the assignment polytope constraints.     

Challenges to the Acceptance of Probabilistic Risk Analysis

This paper discusses a number of the key challenges to the acceptance and application of probabilistic risk analysis (PRA). Those challenges include: (a) the extensive reliance on subjective judgment in PRA, requiring the development of guidance for the use of PRA in risk-informed regulation, and possibly the development of robust or reference prior distributions to minimize the reliance on judgment; and (b) the treatment of human performance in PRA, including not only human error per se but also management and organizational factors more broadly. All of these areas are seen as presenting interesting research challenges at the interface between engineering and other disciplines.     

Human Interindividual Variability in Parameters Related to Health Risks

This paper reviews existing data on the variability in parameters relevant for health risk analyses. We cover both exposure-related parameters and parameters related to individual susceptibility to toxicity. The toxicity/susceptibility data base under construction is part of a longer term research effort to lay the groundwork for quantitative distributional analyses of non-cancer toxic risks. These data are broken down into a variety of parameter types that encompass different portions of the pathway from external exposure to the production of biological responses. The discrete steps in this pathway, as we now conceive them, are:Contact Rate (Breathing rates per body weight; fish consumption per body weight)Uptake or Absorption as a Fraction of Intake or Contact RateGeneral Systemic Availability Net of First Pass Elimination and Dilution via Distribution Volume (e.g., initial blood concentration per mg/kg of uptake)Systemic Elimination (half life or clearance)Active Site Concentration per Systemic Blood or Plasma ConcentrationPhysiological Parameter Change per Active Site Concentration (expressed as the dose required to make a given percentage change in different people, or the dose required to achieve some proportion of an individual's maximum response to the drug or toxicant)Functional Reserve Capacity–Change in Baseline Physiological Parameter Needed to Produce a Biological Response or Pass a Criterion of Abnormal FunctionComparison of the amounts of variability observed for the different parameter types suggests that appreciable variability is associated with the final step in the process–differences among people in functional reserve capacity. This has the implication that relevant information for estimating effective toxic susceptibility distributions may be gleaned by direct studies of the population distributions of key physiological parameters in people that are not exposed to the environmental and occupational toxicants that are thought to perturb those parameters. This is illustrated with some recent observations of the population distributions of Low Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol from the second and third National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys.     

Examining the link between social responsibility and decision styles

The paper examines the factors that influence socially responsible decision making by individuals. The study found four social responsibility styles: Playing it Safe, Weather The Storm, Problem to Solve, and Hope it Goes Away. These styles describe individuals on the basis of decision style, propensity for risk, and coping style. The styles explain why people with different values might come to the same decision in the same circumstances.     

Managerial prerogatives,employee expectations,and property rights in job security: Institutionalizing the “new equity”

Changes in the structure and provisions of the employment relationship create substantial challenges for the management community. The employer-manager's traditional prerogatives to terminate at will are being eroded in response to changing socioeconomic values that recognize the emergence of an employee's reasonable expectations of job security. The United States lags far behind the international community in protecting these expectations. The authors survey the erosion of the employment-at-will doctrine, and review the concepts of corporate due process and property rights relating to employment. To ensure the institutionalization of this new equity, the authors call on the management community to take the initiative in crafting progressive legislation that strikes a sensible balance between managerial prerogatives and employee expectations of job security.     

Counseling models and their impact on how therapists handle values issues

Counseling is not a value free enterprise. Therapeutic models are value laden. Counselors and clients are both emotionally invested in right living issues. Since no therapy is value free, clients face the dilemma of finding a therapist with values similar to their own or having their values challenged. Therapists face the ethical issue of clarifying their own values and determining how to make them known.     

Ethical Futures and Public-Private Partnerships: Peering Far Down the Track

This article employs an institutional perspective in formulating predictions about the ethical futures of privatization partnerships. Although this paper focuses on ethical concerns in the U.S. public sector, it incorporates a multinational dimension in (a) comparing the meaning of privatization among societies and (b) probing privatization financing in the global economy. Five assumptions that flow from institutional reasoning are made explicit as supports for subsequent predictions. The institutional logic shifts privatization conversation away from conventional debate about competition and efficiency toward centralizing forces in both sectors in response to globalization. In that regard, this study identifies the systemic erosion of (local) community integrity as the key privatization problem of the future.     

Context in the Risk Assessment of Digital Systems

As the use of digital computers for instrumentation and control of safety-critical systems has increased, there has been a growing debate over the issue of whether probabilistic risk assessment techniques can be applied to these systems. This debate has centered on the issue of whether software failures can be modeled probabilistically. This paper describes a context-based approach to software risk assessment that explicitly recognizes the fact that the behavior of software is not probabilistic. The source of the perceived uncertainty in its behavior results from both the input to the software as well as the application and environment in which the software is operating. Failures occur as the result of encountering some context for which the software was not properly designed, as opposed to the software simply failing randomly. The paper elaborates on the concept of error-forcing context as it applies to software. It also illustrates a methodology which utilizes event trees, fault trees, and the Dynamic Flowgraph Methodology (DFM) to identify error-forcing contexts for software in the form of fault tree prime implicants.     

An Edge-Splitting Algorithm in Planar Graphs

For a multigraph G = (V, E), let s V be a designated vertex which has an even degree, and let _G (V – s) denote min{c _G(X) | Ø X V – s}, where c _G(X) denotes the size of cut X. Splitting two adjacent edges (s, u) and (s, v) means deleting these edges and adding a new edge (u, v). For an integer k, splitting two edges e ₁ and e ₂ incident to s is called (k, s)-feasible if _G(V – s) k holds in the resulting graph G. In this paper, we prove that, for a planar graph G and an even k or k = 3 with k _G (V – s), there exists a complete (k, s)-feasible splitting at s such that the resulting graph G is still planar, and present an O(n ³ log n) time algorithm for finding such a splitting, where n = |V|. However, for every odd k 5, there is a planar graph G with a vertex s which has no complete (k, s)-feasible and planarity-preserving splitting. As an application of this result, we show that for an outerplanar graph G and an even integer k the problem of optimally augmenting G to a k-edge-connected planar graph can be solved in O(n ³ log n) time.     

Fundamentals of Health Risk Assessment. Use,Derivation, Validity and Limitations of Safety Indices

We investigated the way results of human health risk assessments are used, and the theory used to describe those methods, sometimes called the NAS paradigm. Contrary to a key tenet of that theory, current methods have strictly limited utility. The characterizations now considered standard, Safety Indices such as Acceptable Daily Intake, Reference Dose, and so on, usefully inform only decisions that require a choice between two policy alternatives (e.g., approve a food additive or not), decided solely on the basis of a finding of safety. Risk is characterized as the quotient of one of these Safety Indices divided by an estimate of exposure: a quotient greater than one implies that the situation may be considered safe. Such decisions are very widespread, both in the U. S. federal government and elsewhere. No current method is universal; different policies lead to different practices, for example, in California's Proposition 65, where statutory provisions specify some practices. Further, an important kind of human health risk assessment is not recognized by this theory: this kind characterizes risk as likelihood of harm, given estimates of exposure consequent to various decision choices. Likelihood estimates are necessary whenever decision makers have many possible decision choices and must weigh more than two societal values, such as in EPA's implementation of conventional air pollutants. These estimates can not be derived using current methods; different methods are needed. Our analysis suggests changes needed in both the theory and practice of human health risk assessment, and how what is done is depicted.     

Are g.p.a. and ethics related?

This article reports results of a study of some 200 college-aged students at California State University. Ethical values are measured using a subset of the well-known and frequently used Rokeach Value Survey. Using nonparametric statistical analysis, four value measures, and four different consistent tests of significance and probability, the research data, perhaps disappointedly for many observers including the authors, reveal that there is no relationship between college grade point average and student ethics. Statistical analysis was done on g.p.a. splits of less than 3.0 versus 3.0 or more and also on g.p.a. data for 2.5 or less versus 3.5 or more. In all cases, there are no significant relationships between high or low grade point averages and scores on ethical value rankings.     

Democratizing Risk Management: Successful Public Involvement in Local Water Management Decisions

This paper discusses a successful public involvement effort that addressed and resolved several highly controversial water management issues involving environmental and flood risks associated with an electrical generation facility in British Columbia. It begins with a discussion of concepts for designing public involvement, summarizing research that indicates why individuals and groups may find it difficult to make complex choices. Reasons for public involvement, and the range of current practices are discussed. Next, four principles for designing group decision process are outlined, emphasizing decision-aiding concepts that include value-focused thinking and adaptive management. The next sections discuss the Alouette River Stakeholder Committee process in terms of objectives, participation, process, methods for structuring values and creating alternatives, information sources, and results. Discussion and conclusions complete the paper.     

On Shortest k-Edge-Connected Steiner Networks in Metric Spaces

Given a set of points P in a metric space, let l(P) denote the ratio of lengths between the shortest k-edge-connected Steiner network and the shortest k-edge-connected spanning network on P, and let r = inf l(P) P for k 1. In this paper, we show that in any metric space, r 3/4 for k 2, and there exists a polynomial-time -approximation for the shortest k-edge-connected Steiner network, where = 2 for even k and = 2 + 4/(3k) for odd k. In the Euclidean plane, and .     

Business student ethical values anew in the 1990s

This paper uses a Rokeach Value Survey methodology to again ask the question, now in the mid 1990s, whether business student ethics are different from non-business student ethics. Additionally, the paper addresses the question of whether a course can alter or change student ethics and values during a semester. Thirdly, this paper attempts to operationalize and empirically test and measure the new ethical concepts of moral management and moral maximization.     

A Further Improved Approximation Algorithm for Breakpoint Graph Decomposition

Breakpoint graph decomposition is a crucial step in all recent approximation algorithms for SORTING BY REVERSALS, which is one of the best-known algorithmic problems in computational molecular biology. Caprara and Rizzi recently improved the approximation ratio for breakpoint graph decomposition from to + 1.4348 + , for any positive . In this paper, we extend the techniques of Caprara and Rizzi and incorporate a balancing argument to further improve the approximation ratio to + 1.4193 + , for any positive . These improvements imply improved approximation results for SORTING BY REVERSALS for almost all random permutations.     

Private Action for Public Good?: The Public Role of Voluntary Sector Organizations

Voluntary sector organizations claim to be private institutions acting for the public good. However, if the concept of public is disengaged from the state and connected instead to citizenship, VSOs can be shown to have both private and public origins, as well as private and public impacts. As citizens, VSOs are public organizations serving the public good through their purported representation of the people and civic leadership. The legitimacy of their assumption of these public roles remains a continuing challenge.     

Risk Perceptions,General Environmental Beliefs,and Willingness to Address Climate Change

The research reported here examines the relationship between risk perceptions and willingness to address climate change. The data are a national sample of 1225 mail surveys that include measures of risk perceptions and knowledge tied to climate change, support for voluntary and government actions to address the problem, general environmental beliefs, and demographic variables. Risk perceptions matter in predicting behavioral intentions. Risk perceptions are not a surrogate for general environmental beliefs, but have their own power to account for behavioral intentions. There are four secondary conclusions. First, behavioral intentions regarding climate change are complex and intriguing. People are neither nonbelievers who will take no initiatives themselves and oppose all government efforts, nor are they believers who promise both to make personal efforts and to vote for every government proposal that promises to address climate change. Second, there are separate demographic sources for voluntary actions compared with voting intentions. Third, recognizing the causes of global warming is a powerful predictor of behavioral intentions independent from believing that climate change will happen and have bad consequences. Finally, the success of the risk perception variables to account for behavioral intentions should encourage greater attention to risk perceptions as independent variables. Risk perceptions and knowledge, however, share the stage with general environmental beliefs and demographic characteristics. Although related, risk perceptions, knowledge, and general environmental beliefs are somewhat independent predictors of behavioral intentions.     

Approximation and Exact Algorithms for Constructing Minimum Ultrametric Trees from Distance Matrices

An edge-weighted tree is called ultrametric if the distances from the root to all the leaves in the tree are equal. For an n by n distance matrix M, the minimum ultrametric tree for M is an ultrametric tree T = (V, E, w) with leaf set {1,..., n} such that d_T(i, j) M[i, j] for all i, j and is minimum, where d_T(i, j) is the distance between i and j on T. Constructing minimum ultrametric trees from distance matrices is an important problem in computational biology. In this paper, we examine its computational complexity and approximability. When the distances satisfy the triangle inequality, we show that the minimum ultrametric tree problem can be approximated in polynomial time with error ratio 1.5(1 + log n), where n is the number of species. We also develop an efficient branch-and-bound algorithm for constructing the minimum ultrametric tree for both metric and non-metric inputs. The experimental results show that it can find an optimal solution for 25 species within reasonable time, while, to the best of our knowledge, there is no report of algorithms solving the problem even for 12 species.     

Scheduling in Switching Networks with Set-Up Delays

We consider the (preemptive bipartite scheduling problem PBS) (Crescenzi et al., On approximating a scheduling problem, Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, vol. 5, pp. 287–297, 2001) arising in switching communication systems, where each input and output port can be involved in at most one communication at the same time. Given a set of communication tasks to be communicated from the transmitters to the receivers of such a system, we aim to find a schedule minimizing the overall transmission time. To achieve this, we allow the preemption of communication tasks. However, in practice preemption comes with a cost, d, and this renders the problem NP-hard (Gopal et al., An optimal switching algorithm for multibeam satellite systems with variable bandwidth beams, IEEE Trans. Commun., vol.30, pp. 2475–2481, 1982). In this paper, we present a approximation algorithm, which is the first one for the PBS problem with approximation ratio strictly less than two. Furthermore, we propose a simple optimal polynomial time algorithm for a subclass of instances of the PBS problem.This work has been partially supported by the the European Union (FET-Working Group APPOL II), and the Greek General Secretariat of Research and Technology.