Agri-Food Restructuring: A Synthesis of Recent Australian Research

Abstract Globalizing tendencies within capitalism are leading to important alterations in the structure of agricultural production and the ways food companies are involving themselves in processing and marketing. Increasingly, finance capital and transnational agribusiness have sought ways to influence, and in some cases redirect, farming activities in Australia. The penetration of farming structures by corporate capital has been hastened by state deregulation. Rather than providing detailed empirical evidence, this paper presents a broad synthesis of recent Australian research with the aim of informing readers otherwise unaware of events in the Antipodes of the forms and impacts of agri-food change in Australia.     

Optimal Stopping Analysis of a Radiation Detection System to Protect Cities from a Nuclear Terrorist Attack

We formulate and analyze an optimal stopping problem concerning a terrorist who is attempting to drive a nuclear or radiological weapon toward a target in a city center. In our model, the terrorist needs to travel through a two-dimensional lattice containing imperfect radiation sensors at some of the nodes, and decides at each node whether to detonate the bomb or proceed. We consider five different scenarios containing various informational structures and two different sensor array topologies: the sensors are placed randomly or they form an outer wall around the periphery of the city. We find that sensors can act as a deterrent in some cases, and that the government prefers the outer wall topology unless the sensors have a very low detection probability and the budget is tight (so that they are sparsely deployed).     

Social relations undone: Disciplinary divergence and departmental politics at Harvard, 1946–1970

This article examines the failed convergence of sociology, social psychology, cultural anthropology, and clinical psychology in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations. The analysis shows that from its inception, the department was torn by fundamental contradictions involving membership criteria, stratification, the opposed needs of faculty and students, and the requisites of disciplinary autonomy. These conflicts, which were especially intense with regard to psychology, ultimately made the department ungovernable and led to the restoration of earlier administrative boundaries.     

Multiple Imputation of Missing or Faulty Values Under Linear Constraints

Many statistical agencies, survey organizations, and research centers collect data that suffer from item nonresponse and erroneous or inconsistent values. These data may be required to satisfy linear constraints, for example, bounds on individual variables and inequalities for ratios or sums of variables. Often these constraints are designed to identify faulty values, which then are blanked and imputed. The data also may exhibit complex distributional features, including nonlinear relationships and highly nonnormal distributions. We present a fully Bayesian, joint model for modeling or imputing data with missing/blanked values under linear constraints that (i) automatically incorporates the constraints in inferences and imputations, and (ii) uses a flexible Dirichlet process mixture of multivariate normal distributions to reflect complex distributional features. Our strategy for estimation is to augment the observed data with draws from a hypothetical population in which the constraints are not present, thereby taking advantage of computationally expedient methods for fitting mixture models. Missing/blanked items are sampled from their posterior distribution using the Hit-and-Run sampler, which guarantees that all imputations satisfy the constraints. We illustrate the approach using manufacturing data from Colombia, examining the potential to preserve joint distributions and a regression from the plant productivity literature. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Barriers to Swift,Even Flow in the Internal Supply Chain of Perioperative Surgical Services Department: A Case Study*

This research analyzes the internal service supply chain of a perioperative surgical services department of a nonacademic community hospital using the theory of swift and even flow as a theoretical lens. Performance data were gathered using an in‐depth case study and it was determined that the swift and even flow constructs did affect flow speed and variance, but did not account for all the effects observed. To understand the need for departments to coordinate their efforts with each other and how this affected flow, further analysis was conducted using insights from Pagell's (2004) theory of internal integration and Gittell's (2002) research about coordinating mechanisms. The findings suggest the need to incorporate a variable measuring supply chain coordination into the theory of swift and even flow.     

A Continuous‐Review Inventory Model with Disruptions at Both Supplier and Retailer

We consider a continuous‐review inventory problem for a retailer who faces random disruptions both internally and externally (from its supplier). We formulate the expected inventory cost at this retailer and analyze the properties of the cost function. In particular, we show that the cost function is quasi‐convex and therefore can be efficiently optimized to numerically find the optimal order size from the retailer to the supplier. Computational experiments provide additional insight into the problem. In addition, we introduce an effective approximation of the cost function. Our approximation can be solved in closed form, which is useful when the model is embedded into more complicated supply chain design or management models.