Sources of Population Aging in More and Less Developed Countries

We provide the first global assessment of the sources of population aging by tracing its origins to the demographic histories of more and less developed countries. In more developed countries, improvements in survival among successive cohorts have accounted for the large majority of the recent increase in the population's mean age. Improved survivorship and declines in the growth rate of births have made roughly equal contributions to the aging that is occurring in less developed countries. Aging is more rapid in less developed countries because the number of births has declined faster, with China and India making large contributions. Use of the proportion of the population above age 65, 70, or 75 as measures of aging produces results similar to those using the mean age. Mortality decline becomes an even larger contributor to aging using all these measures, and its contribution grows as age advances.     

The contingent nature of best practices in national competitiveness: The case of American and Japanese innovation processes

We propose that the differences in competitiveness of companies from different countries is not just a question of the adoption of ‘better’ management models, as conventional wisdom would have us believe; rather, we contend that national competitiveness can change radically over time without significant changes in management practices. Contrary to much of the management literature we hold that changes in the global business environment often determine to a large degree the competitiveness of companies. Based on our assumptions we offer four specific lessons of how companies can increase their competitiveness within the constraints of the socio-cultural context in which they operate.     

Information Technology Project Escalation: A Process Model*

Information technology (IT) a common and costly problem. While much is known about the factors that promote escalation behavior, little is known about the actual escalation process. This article uses an in‐depth case study to construct a process model of escalation, consisting of three phases: drift, unsuccessful incremental adaptation, and rationalized continuation. Each phase encompasses several within‐phase escalation catalysts and the model also identifies triggering conditions that promote transition from one phase to the next: project framing (antecedent condition), problem emergence, increased problem visibility, and imminent threat to project continuation (triggering the outcome deescalation). The results show that escalation is not necessarily the result of collective belief in the infallibility of a project. Rather, escalation results from continued unsuccessful coping with problems that arise during a project. Furthermore, the results suggest that the seeds of escalation are sown early: the very manner in which a project is framed contributes to whether or not the project will become prone to escalation. As problems ensue, repeated mismatches between attempted remedies and underlying problems contribute to fueling the escalation process. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Making the strategic plan work

Learn the essentials for a team to create a strategic plan and the process for using the plan as the focus of the team's work.     

The Price Chameleons Pay: Self‐monitoring,Boundary Spanning and Role Conflict in the Workplace*

The vast majority of research on self‐monitoring in the workplace focuses on the benefits that accrue to chameleon‐like high self‐monitors (relative to true‐to‐themselves low self‐monitors). In this study, we depart from the mainstream by focusing on a potential liability of being a high self‐monitor: high levels of experienced role conflict. We hypothesize that high self‐monitors tend to choose work situations that, although consistent with the expression of their characteristic personality, inherently involve greater role conflict (i.e. competing role expectations from different role senders). Data collected from a 116‐member high‐tech firm showed support for this mediation hypothesis: relative to low self‐monitors, high self‐monitors tended to experience greater role conflict in work organizations because high self‐monitors were more likely to occupy boundary spanning positions. To help draw a more realistic and balanced portrait of self‐monitoring in the workplace, we call for more theoretically grounded research on the price chameleons pay.     

Beyond Rhetorical Differences: A Cohesive Account of Post‐devolution Developments in UK Health Policy

Health is perhaps the most significant policy area to be devolved to decision‐makers in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Consequently, there has been a great deal of interest in assessing the extent to which health policies (which already differed somewhat prior to devolution) have diverged since 1999. To date, analyses have tended to focus either on health care policies or on specific public health issues (e.g. health inequalities or tobacco control). The story that emerges from this body of work suggests health care policies have diverged significantly, whilst public health policies have remained remarkably similar. This article is one of the first to consider health care and public health policy alongside each other. It reassesses and updates previous analyses, incorporating developments relating to the 2010 general election and the 2007 and 2011 devolved administration elections. Drawing on a variety of textual sources (policy documents, research evidence and corporate literature), our findings differ from existing analyses in suggesting that, despite some noticeable differences in policy rhetoric, approaches to both health care provision and tackling public health problems remain similar. Looking to the future, the article concludes that the common economic challenges, combined with a tight fiscal policy (that remains excepted from devolution), means the similarities in health care provision across the UK are likely to remain more pronounced than the differences. However, current debate about the constitutional settlement, and in particular the prospect of greater fiscal freedoms for the devolved administrations, may provide opportunities for more meaningful divergence in health policy than has been possible hitherto.     

谷歌要输给“邪恶的独角兽”了

正谷歌正设法与假新闻作斗争,但不会做出彻底改变。"邪恶的独角兽"并不是指那些变坏了的高估值的初创企业,这个词是由谷歌的工程师创造的,来形容那些对未经证实的主题充斥着谎言的网页。当网上某一主题的相关信息非常匮乏时,那些充斥着谎言的网页就会被推到搜索结果的前几位,因为搜索引擎实在找不到其他信息可供显示。     

The relative performance of ensemble methods with deep convolutional neural networks for image classification

Artificial neural networks have been successfully applied to a variety of machine learning tasks, including image recognition, semantic segmentation, and machine translation. However, few studies fully investigated ensembles of artificial neural networks. In this work, we investigated multiple widely used ensemble methods, including unweighted averaging, majority voting, the Bayes Optimal Classifier, and the (discrete) Super Learner, for image recognition tasks, with deep neural networks as candidate algorithms. We designed several experiments, with the candidate algorithms being the same network structure with different model checkpoints within a single training process, networks with same structure but trained multiple times stochastically, and networks with different structure. In addition, we further studied the overconfidence phenomenon of the neural networks, as well as its impact on the ensemble methods. Across all of our experiments, the Super Learner achieved best performance among all the ensemble methods in this study.