Mobile homes in hyperspace: Recognition memory for architectural form

The relationship between the distinctiveness of a building and memory for that building was examined in a recognition memory experiment. Multidimensional scaling was employed as a means of operationally defining the relative distinctiveness of each member of a set of environmental stimuli. Obtained results indicated that a building's position in multidimensional space significantly predicted the probability of a correct recognition response.     

Inshopping by Residents of Small Communities1

With improvements in transportation and communication, rural consumers no longer are limited to their local trade center and personal factors become more important in shaping consumer patterns. With data from residents in two small rural communities in northwestern Missouri, this study examines the effects of consumers' socioeconomic characteristics, personal location situations, and community satisfaction on buying within the local community (inshopping) versus in other communities (outshopping) for selected goods and services. Age is the socioeconomic variable most strongly related to inshopping. Residing in the center versus open country, jobholders outside the community, and residing in the more viable community are related to shopping for certain of the goods and services as is satisfaction with the community. Location remains an important influence on shopping behavior but it needs to be conceptualized differently.     

Computational results for very large air crew scheduling problems

The airline crew scheduling problem is typically formulated as a set covering problem. The Federal Express Corporation has recently implemented a heuristic crew scheduling system based on this model. The system has been implemented on an IBM 3033 computer. Computational results are presented for crew scheduling problems with up to 3000 rows and 15,000 columns. Results of operational quality are obtained in less than one hour of computer time. This model provides a prototype for a wide variety of large scale crew scheduling applications.     

Gender-Deviancy and Crime: An American Fantasy

The political usefulness of such terms as domesticity has changed since the 1950s. Nonetheless, some elements have remained stable over the decades. Of particular interest is the continued use of fear in public representations to create and to stabilize the domestic space. This essay considers several crime narratives of domestic intrusion, written at successive points in this period, and concludes with the Andrew Cunanan coverage, examining how different narratives of criminal intimacy exploit similar codes of failed gender. The essay argues that the crisis announced by the serial killer is less about killing than about the perceived disarray of cultural intimacies and the collapse of the public/private binary that these govern.     

Strategic thinking—Dealing with uncertainty

Frameworks for strategic planning provide questions, but the answers depend on executives' strategic thinking. Three methods of strategic thinking are delineated. Assessment involves classification and modelling of the situation; problem identification and analysis involve goal formulation and strategy design; and synthesis involves inferences about assumptions, dialectical analysis and reframing. The methods provide executives with different ways of dealing with uncertainty. Either problem analysis of synthesis is used when objectives and the appropriate corrective action are certain. Problem identification is used when there is ambiguity about strategic direction, and assessment is a style adapted to ambiguity about both objectives and corrective action.     

Multi-stage scheduling for banks by mathematical programming

Despite moves toward electronic funds transfer systems, the United States banking industry must continue to cope with the paper processing requirements associated with a payments system still heavily reliant upon checks. Through the development of MICR (magnetic ink character recognition), computers have been utilized to sort documents and post customer accounts. However, a labor intensive key encoding function is required to prepare documents for processing. An attempt to eliminate the labor intensity is the recent development of optical scanning capture equipment which ‘reads’ printed or hand-written documents and inscribes them with MICR characters. However, the utilization of optical scanning technology requires the scheduling and coordination of five processing activities. A mathematical programming model has been developed which minimizes the combination of payroll and float costs while recognizing machine capacity constraints in the scheduling of optical capture systems. The formulation was specifically designed to respond to the bank check processing scheduling problem. However, with minor modifications, the model is directly transferable to any multi-echelon processing system where penalties are incurred when the units of output fail to meet prespecified deadlines.