Das Karriereplateau

The career-plateau as challenge to enterprises, employees and consultantsThe authors intend to link life-span-psychology to career-research in order to make understand the phenomenon of career-plateau and how individuals and organisations can deal with it. People take stock in the middle of their lives and assess their personal or professional targets. This process often relates to a personal crisis, especially when the success rate of a job is an important part of the self-concept and hierarchical development has stopped simultaneously. Nevertheless, the desire for a career continues to exist. On top of that what makes it even harder is that the individual has to work at least 20 more years because of demographic reasons. We assume that the way how to manage this crisis has a big influence on performance motivation and that life-span-orientated management development can help the individual to overcome the crisis or even prevent it.     

Using the End‐User Computing Satisfaction (EUCS) Instrument to Measure Satisfaction with a Web Site

The purpose of this study is to revise and revalidate the End‐User Computing Satisfaction (EUCS) instrument to measure satisfaction with a Web site from a usability perspective. This study is especially important given the increased significance of the Web and the uniqueness of the Web as a computing environment. A total of 176 students participated in a lab simulation that involved a usability evaluation of the Lands' End Web site ( http://www.landsend.com ). Students were asked to complete a set of tasks, record their answers, and then complete the EUCS instrument. Confirmatory factor analysis and invariance analyses were conducted to test the reliability, validity, and generalizability of the revised EUCS. The results show that the EUCS is a valid and robust instrument in the Web environment but that one of the subfactors, timeliness, will need further refinement in the future. Usability practitioners can use the EUCS to measure end‐user satisfaction with a Web site and use the feedback for improving Web‐site design. We describe a case study of an actual usability application that utilized the revised EUCS effectively to support the design of building supply Web sites involving two types of end users, homeowners and contractors. We also propose a typology that researchers can use as a starting point to judge when it is necessary to revalidate an instrument like the EUCS. Finally, we discuss the limitations of our study and present avenues for future research.     

Demand and Production Management with Uniform Guaranteed Lead Time

Recently, innovation‐oriented firms have been competing along dimensions other than price, lead time being one such dimension. Increasingly, customers are favoring lead time guarantees as a means to hedge supply chain risks. For a make‐to‐order environment, we explicitly model the impact of a lead time guarantee on customer demands and production planning. We study how a firm can integrate demand and production decisions to optimize expected profits by quoting a uniform guaranteed maximum lead time to all customers. Our analysis highlights the increasing importance of lead time for customers, as well as the tradeoffs in achieving a proper balance between revenue and cost drivers associated with lead‐time guarantees. We show that the optimal lead time has a closed‐form solution with a newsvendor‐like structure. We prove comparative statics results for the change in optimal lead time with changes in capacity and cost parameters and illustrate the insights using numerical experimentation.     

Feature Selection for Consistent Biclustering via Fractional 0–1 Programming

Biclustering consists in simultaneous partitioning of the set of samples and the set of their attributes (features) into subsets (classes). Samples and features classified together are supposed to have a high relevance to each other which can be observed by intensity of their expressions. We define the notion of consistency for biclustering using interrelation between centroids of sample and feature classes. We prove that consistent biclustering implies separability of the classes by convex cones. While previous works on biclustering concentrated on unsupervised learning and did not consider employing a training set, whose classification is given, we propose a model for supervised biclustering, whose consistency is achieved by feature selection. The developed model involves solution of a fractional 0–1 programming problem. Preliminary computational results on microarray data mining problems are reported.This research work was partially supported by NSF, NIH and AirForce grants.     

Tolerable or Acceptable: A Comparison of Risk Regulation in the United Kingdom and in the Netherlands

In managing major accident hazards in industry risk, both the United Kingdom and the Netherlands use quantitative risk analysis and quantified risk criteria. These should be understood in the historical, legal, and political context in which they were drawn up. Even when criteria are numerically the same they do not necessarily mean the same thing. The legal and historical context differs widely between the two countries. Nevertheless, it is surprising that the final results in terms of land use and levels of risk are very similar.     

A Screening Methodology for the Identification and Ranking of Infrastructure Vulnerabilities Due to Terrorism

The extreme importance of critical infrastructures to modern society is widely recognized. These infrastructures are complex and interdependent. Protecting the critical infrastructures from terrorism presents an enormous challenge. Recognizing that society cannot afford the costs associated with absolute protection, it is necessary to identify and prioritize the vulnerabilities in these infrastructures. This article presents a methodology for the identification and prioritization of vulnerabilities in infrastructures. We model the infrastructures as interconnected digraphs and employ graph theory to identify the candidate vulnerable scenarios. These scenarios are screened for the susceptibility of their elements to a terrorist attack, and a prioritized list of vulnerabilities is produced. The prioritization methodology is based on multiattribute utility theory. The impact of losing infrastructure services is evaluated using a value tree that reflects the perceptions and values of the decisionmaker and the relevant stakeholders. These results, which are conditional on a specified threat, are provided to the decisionmaker for use in risk management. The methodology is illustrated through the presentation of a portion of the analysis conducted on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.     

Generating a smallest binary tree by proper selection of the longest edges to bisect in a unit simplex refinement

In several areas like global optimization using branch-and-bound methods for mixture design, the unit n-simplex is refined by longest edge bisection (LEB). This process provides a binary search tree. For \(n>2\), simplices appearing during the refinement process can have more than one longest edge (LE). The size of the resulting binary tree depends on the specific sequence of bisected longest edges. The questions are how to calculate the size of one of the smallest binary trees generated by LEB and how to find the corresponding sequence of LEs to bisect, which can be represented by a set of LE indices. Algorithms answering these questions are presented here. We focus on sets of LE indices that are repeated at a level of the binary tree. A set of LEs was presented in Aparicio et al. (Informatica 26(1):17–32, 2015), for \(n=3\). An additional question is whether this set is the best one under the so-called \(m_k\)-valid condition.     

Organisationskultur im Spielfilm

By analyzing cinema films, specific organizational cultures can be illustrated. The culture of prison as a “total institution” is explained on the basis of the movie “The Shawshank Redemption” (1994). With regard to the developing friendship between the former banker Andy Dufresne who is innocently convicted and the homicide delinquent Ellis Boyd Redding typical characteristics of a total institution are pointed out. Furthermore, the psychological function those characteristics serve for employees, inmates and even for the society as a whole is analyzed. Central to this interpretation is thinking of the prison as a father substitute. Many interactions become comprehensible viewed in this context. Additionally, the prison represents a huge object of projection which facilitates the collective release of aggression.     

Flood Catastrophe Model for Designing Optimal Flood Insurance Program: Estimating Location‐Specific Premiums in the Netherlands

As flood risks grow worldwide, a well‐designed insurance program engaging various stakeholders becomes a vital instrument in flood risk management. The main challenge concerns the applicability of standard approaches for calculating insurance premiums of rare catastrophic losses. This article focuses on the design of a flood‐loss‐sharing program involving private insurance based on location‐specific exposures. The analysis is guided by a developed integrated catastrophe risk management (ICRM) model consisting of a GIS‐based flood model and a stochastic optimization procedure with respect to location‐specific risk exposures. To achieve the stability and robustness of the program towards floods with various recurrences, the ICRM uses stochastic optimization procedure, which relies on quantile‐related risk functions of a systemic insolvency involving overpayments and underpayments of the stakeholders. Two alternative ways of calculating insurance premiums are compared: the robust derived with the ICRM and the traditional average annual loss approach. The applicability of the proposed model is illustrated in a case study of a Rotterdam area outside the main flood protection system in the Netherlands. Our numerical experiments demonstrate essential advantages of the robust premiums, namely, that they: (1) guarantee the program's solvency under all relevant flood scenarios rather than one average event; (2) establish a tradeoff between the security of the program and the welfare of locations; and (3) decrease the need for other risk transfer and risk reduction measures.