Accent on Teaching Materials

Estimation of covariance components in the multivariate random-effect model with nested covariance structure is discussed. There are two covariance matrices to be estimated, namely, the between-group and the within-group covariance matrices. These two covariance matrices are most often estimated by forming a multivariate analysis of variance and equating mean square matrices to their expectations. Such a procedure involves taking the difference between the between-group mean square and the within-group mean square matrices, and often produces an estimated between-group covariance matrix that is not nonnegative definite. We present estimators of the two covariance matrices that are always proper covariance matrices. The estimators are the restricted maximum likelihood estimators if the random effects are normally distributed. The estimation procedure is extended to more complicated models, including the twofold nested and the mixed-effect models. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the use of the estimation procedure.     

Accent on Teaching Materials: Notices and Reviews of Important Teaching Materials

This article examines the probabilities of outcomes from rolling dice with the dimension 1 × 1 × r for various values of r. Experiments were conducted by school students and university students. The results of the experiments are given and the probabilities examined using a generalized linear model. Notes are also made about the value of the experiment in teaching the groups of students.     

High value manufacturing: Capability,appropriation, and governance

Manufacturing competitiveness is on many policy agendas, born out of a concern for firms in high-cost economies finding themselves outcompeted by low-cost rivals. Government policy makers and manufacturing firm strategists have put their faith in what we label as high value manufacturing (HVM). We see HVM as an incipient phenomenon currently in a situation of prescience, as something that is still “in-the-making,” with manufacturing firms trying to find ways to be able to step away from having to compete on price. This paper consults relevant strategy theories with the purpose to pinpoint the issues and problems that need to be accommodated for bringing HVM into being and for creating the effects that are anticipated. We found that HVM must be seen as a distributed activity, thus realizing complex functionality for a system-of-use, while being subjected to path constitution. For HVM to function, the firms involved need to find solutions to the capability problem, the appropriation problem, and the governance problem. We suggest that further research needs to involve itself in problem-solving activity to assist in bringing HVM about while simultaneously further developing strategy theory geared toward firms that are involved in a distributed activity like HVM.     

Feelings of Belonging: An Exploratory Analysis of the Sociopolitical Involvement of Black,Latina, and Asian/Pacific Islander Sexual Minority Women

This article compares and contrasts the sociopolitical involvement of Black, Latina, and Asian/Pacific Islander American sexual minority women within lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities of color. For the analysis, a sample of over 1,200 women from the Social Justice Sexuality project was analyzed. Findings indicate that, for all groups of women, feelings of connectedness to the LGBT community was the most significant predictor of sociopolitical involvement within LGBT communities of color.     

Topics in Microbial Risk Assessment: Dynamic Flow Tree Process

Microbial risk assessment is emerging as a new discipline in risk assessment. A systematic approach to microbial risk assessment is presented that employs data analysis for developing parsimonious models and accounts formally for the variability and uncertainty of model inputs using analysis of variance and Monte Carlo simulation. The purpose of the paper is to raise and examine issues in conducting microbial risk assessments. The enteric pathogen Escherichia coli O157:H7 was selected as an example for this study due to its significance to public health. The framework for our work is consistent with the risk assessment components described by the National Research Council in 1983 (hazard identification; exposure assessment; dose-response assessment; and risk characterization). Exposure assessment focuses on hamburgers, cooked a range of temperatures from rare to well done, the latter typical for fast food restaurants. Features of the model include predictive microbiology components that account for random stochastic growth and death of organisms in hamburger. For dose-response modeling, Shigella data from human feeding studies were used as a surrogate for E. coli O157:H7. Risks were calculated using a threshold model and an alternative nonthreshold model. The 95% probability intervals for risk of illness for product cooked to a given internal temperature spanned five orders of magnitude for these models. The existence of even a small threshold has a dramatic impact on the estimated risk.     

Measuring Christian Beliefs that Affect Managerial Decision-Making: A Beginning

Although considerable work has been done on the measurement of religious values and beliefs, little is understood about their effect on managerial values and decision making. This paper reports on theoretical work by the authors identifying Christian religious beliefs that might affect managerial decision making; it also reports the results of empirical work validating five scales of religious beliefs that might affect managerial decision making. Future research directions are proposed. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Capturing Relatedness: Comprehensive Measures based on Secondary Data

This paper presents new measures of technological and customer‐side relatedness constructed from widely available secondary data. Relatedness is a concept central to predicting the existence and nature of a relationship between corporate diversification and firm performance. Yet, finding appropriate measures has been an ongoing struggle. The widely used SIC‐based entropy measure has low construct validity, and survey‐based measures are hard to replicate across firms and industries and over time. The measures we develop significantly outperform established measures in explaining variation in firm performance across firms and over time, and both sources of relatedness are found to be independent and significant explanations of firm performance.