Public Attitudes Toward Immigration in the United States and Canada in Response to the September 11, 2001 "Attack on America"

In this paper, we describe recent trends in attitudes toward immigration in North America, and we suggest how these attitudes are likely to be affected by the September 11, 2001 "Attack on America." We begin by explaining why public attitudes toward immigration are important, and describe recent trends in these attitudes in the United States and Canada. Then, we apply psychological perspectives to predicting how these attitudes are likely to change in response to the events of September 11th. In particular, we describe expected short-term changes in immigration attitudes and expected long-term trends. We conclude by suggesting that an understanding of the psychological processes underlying unfavorable attitudes may assist in counteracting these effects; we also suggest that policy makers will be faced with the difficult task of balancing the need for a sense of security for members of the national group, and maintenance of the positive features of current immigration policies.     

Human and organizational factors in offshore safety

The role of human and organizational factors in predicting accidents and incidents has become of major interest to the UK offshore oil and gas industry. Some of these factors had been measured in an earlier study focusing on the role of risk perception in determining accident involvement. The current study sought to extend the methodology by focusing on perceptions of organizational factors that could have an impact on safety. A self-report questionnaire was developed and distributed to 11 installations operating on the UK Continental Shelf. A total of 722 were returned (33% response rate) from a representative sample of the offshore workforce on these installations. The study investigated the underlying structure and content of offshore employees' attitudes to safety, feelings of safety and satisfaction with safety measures. Correlations and step-wise regression analysis were used to test the relationships between measures. The results suggest that 'unsafe' behaviour is the 'best' predictor of accidents/near misses as measured by self-report data and that unsafe behaviour is, in turn, driven by perceptions of pressure for production.     

THE INTERACTION OF TRANSPORTATION AND INVENTORY DECISIONS

The management of inventories and determination of transportation policy are normally carried out by different groups of people in an organization. These activities interact, however, when the transportation is used to replace inventory and when the transportation alternatives have different speed, reliability, and cost characteristics. This paper presents exact and heuristic procedures for jointly determining the inventory reorder points, order quantities, and transportation alternatives that provide minimum total transportation and inventory costs. The effectiveness of each procedure is demonstrated for a broad range of problems. The heuristic procedure was also applied to actual company data to determine the potential for cost savings. The results showed that savings were possible both from improving the current procedures and from applying the procedure developed in this study.