An examination of the role of online social media in journalists’ source mix

Using telephone surveys of business/financial journalists in the United States (n = 200), this research investigates the agenda-building role of social media content in journalists’ work. Understanding that more non-public relations content from user-generated and social network sites, like YouTube and Twitter, are fast becoming resources for journalists to get story ideas, break scandals, and find sources, we began this scholarly work to determine the frequency of such uses of social media. Overall, findings indicate very little use of social media by these business journalists. Results and implications for public relations practitioners are discussed in detail.     

Effects of Group Practice of the Transcendental Meditation Program on Preventing Violent Crime in Washington,D.C.: Results of the National Demonstration Project,June--July 1993

This paper reports the results of a prospective experiment in which a group of approximately 4,000 participants in the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi programs of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi assembled in Washington, D.C., from June 7 to July 30, 1993. It was hypothesized that levels of violent crime in the District of Columbia would fall substantially during the Demonstration Project, as a result of the group's effect of increasing coherence and reducing stress in the collective consciousness of the District. A 27-member Project Review Board comprising independent scientists and leading citizens approved the research protocol and monitored the research process. Weekly crime data was derived from database records provided by the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department (DCMPD), which are used in the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. Statistical analysis considered the effect of weather variables, daylight, historical crime trends and annual patterns in the District of Columbia, as well as trends in neighboring cities. Consistent with previous research, levels of homicides, rapes and assaults (HRA crimes) correlated with average weekly temperature. Robberies approximately followed an annually recurring cycle. Time series analysis of 1993 data, controlling for temperature, showed that HRA crimes dropped significantly during the Demonstration Project, corresponding with increases in the size of the group; the maximum decrease was 23.3% (p < 2 × 10–9) [24.6% using a longer baseline, with 1988--1993 data (p < 3 × 10–5)], coincident with the peak number of participants in the group during the final week of the assembly. When the same period in each of the five previous years was examined, no significant decreases in HRA crimes were found. Robberies did not decrease significantly. However, a model that jointly estimated the effect of the Demonstration Project on both HRA crimes and robberies showed a significant reduction in violent crimes overall of 15.6% (p = 0.0008). Further analysis showed that the effect of the coherence-creating group on reducing HRA crimes could not be accounted for by additional police staffing. The time series analysis for HRA crimes gave results that are highly robust to alternative model specifications, and showed that the effect of the group size was cumulative and persisted after the Demonstration Project ended. Also, calculation of the steady state gain based on the time series model predicted that a permanent group of 4,000 coherence-creating experts in the District would have a long-term effect of reducing HRA crimes by 48%.     

Residential preferences and population distribution

Public opinion research has revealed decided preferences for living in rural areas and small towns, and proponents of population deconcentration have interpreted this as support for their policies. This study, based on a national sample, yielded similar results, but when we introduced the additional possibility of a preference for proximity to a larger city, then the rural areas preferred were found, for most respondents, to be those within the commuting range of a metropolitan central city. Although persons wishing to live near large cities were found to be looking for the same qualities of living sought by those who prefer a more remote location, these findings are not, in general, consistent with the argument that public preferences support strategies of population dispersal into nonmetropolitan areas. Instead they indicate that most of those who wish to live in a different location favor the peripheral metropolitan ring areas that have, in fact, been growing rapidly by in-migration.     

Congestion,quality deterioration,and optimal use: Wilderness recreation in the Spanish peaks primitive area

With increasing demand for low-density recreational services and limited supply of facilities to provide them, congestion is becoming an important management problem. The purpose of this paper is to outline a model of congestion, estimate the effect of it upon individual willingness to pay for wilderness experiences, and illustrate how these results might be used for efficient management. A survey of users of the Spanish Peaks Primitive Area indicates that their revealed willingness to pay is significantly affected by encroachments upon the solitude they experience during their trip. Consequently, congestion effects for such services can be measured and used in the formation of administrative policy.     

INSTRUCTING OPERATIONS DESIGN: AN EXPERIENTIAL APPROACH

Teaching an operations design course has major pedagogical challenges. (1) The design topics—output, process, facility, and work design—are necessarily taught sequentially, yet the decisions are integrative. (2) Instruction must be generic to service or product producers. (3) Discussing output design is difficult since students typically have had no exposure to the “product language” of engineering graphics. (4) No text is available which examines in sufficient depth all the operations design decisions. (5) Cases necessarily depict historical situations—process technologies and economic data—while operations managers must plan future directions for their productive systems. (6) While the commercial world contains fresh information and data, students are inexperienced in obtaining knowledge from the real world. (7) While the course presents an operations management perspective, students must recognize the information, data, and cooperation necessary from the other functional areas to successfully complete the operations design. To help overcome these seven pedagogical challenges, the students in the undergraduate and graduate operation design courses complete a comprehensive feasibility study for a new product or service and the entire productive system.     

TEACHING EFFECTIVENESS IN THE DECISION SCIENCES: THE USE OF STUDENT EVALUATIONS

This article presents the results of an AIDS-sponsored investigation of teaching effectiveness in the decision sciences. Two national samples were employed in the study: a sample of 247 business school deans and a sample of 3,292 students from 32 different business schools. Included among the findings are that 87 percent of the deans responding indicate they require some sort of faculty teaching effectiveness evaluation, and that great care must be exercised when interpreting student ratings of an individual instructor's teaching effectiveness.     

AUTOCORRELATED CASH FLOWS AND THE SELECTION OF A PORTFOLIO OF CAPITAL ASSETS *

Capital budgeting models for analyzing real assets typically are based on a set of restrictive assumptions that influence financial managers' decisions and may prevent optimization of the firm's objectives. This research examines the common restrictive assumption that cash flows are intertemporally independent by first developing an economic state and simulation model based on a Markov process for including autocorrelated cash flows in the capital budgeting decision process and then demonstrating why managers should include autocorrelated cash flows in capital budgeting models by empirically testing the impact of assuming intertemporally independent cash flows on capital budgeting decisions. The results indicate that ignoring autocorrelated cash flows seriously limits the ability of capital budgeting models to provide optimal investment decisions. The model also is very attractive for practical application because it can be implemented with a minimum number of estimates and provides the set of input data required by a number of capital budgeting models. A discussion of the implementation of the model is included.