Rational forecasts: On confirming ambiguity as the mother of conformity

The Rational Expectations Hypothesis claims that all available information is used in making forecasts. We contend that one of the pieces of information used by forecasters is the previous forecasts of others. Psychologists have demonstrated that under conditions of ambiguous stimuli. individuals frequently adapt their individual opinions so as to conform to peer opinions. Thus, we develop a Convergent Expectations Hypothesis, in which forecasters incorporate previous forecasts of other agents in forming their own expectations. The hypothesis is tested using data from six forecaster groups for four time periods. In all four time periods, forecasters appear to make considerable use of the prior consensus forecast in developing their own predictions. The resulting expectations may still be ‘rational’ in that there are psychological and perhaps financial benefits to conforming to the forecasts of professional peers.     

Immediate Memory for Mismatched Speech and Representational Gesture Across Development

Two experiments examined how 7- and 8-year-old children, 9- and 10-year-old children, and adults process mismatched, task-related speech and gesture differently as a function of development. Participants watched videotapes of children speaking and gesturing about the concept of conservation. Using a recognition paradigm, we assessed immediate memory for information conveyed in mismatched speech and gesture. In Experiment 1, we used recognition of verbal statements to probe participants' memory, whereas in Experiment 2, we used recognition of gestural statements to probe memory. When probed with verbal statements in Experiment 1, 9- and 10-year-old children failed to retrieve gestured information. When probed with gestural statements in Experiment 2, 9- and 10-year-old children failed to retrieve verbal information. In contrast, the younger children and adults showed retrieval of both verbal and gestural information across both recognition methods in Experiments 1 and 2. These results suggest a U-shaped function with the 9- and 10-year-old children showing a limitation in the ability to process contradictory messages simultaneously conveyed in two modalities. Implications for identifying a transitional period in the development of representational skills are discussed.     

Classical Statements on Geopolitics and the Aftermath of War

The relationship among geopolitical position, political legitimacy, and internal conflict has been rejuvenated as a topic of theoretical interest. This revival of interest has, to a degree, borrowed from earlier theories, but the implications of these earlier theories have not been fully explored. In this article the classical geopolitical statements of Herbert Spencer and Max Weber are modeled to highlight their continued relevance to sociological theories that address the relationship between geopolitics and internal societal processes.     

Doctoral Theses 1954-1996

The present article centres on a group of Indonesians and Australians who are members of a gamelan ensemble based at the Consulate of the Republic of Indonesia in Perth, Western Australia. By examining why Australians and Indonesians choose to participate in this musical community, the article investigates how these individuals negotiate and construct musical identities to give local meaning to gamelan in the West Australian context.     

Fertility trends in Australia

Using published data from the Australian vital registration and census systems, several time series are compiled: crude birth rates from the 1860s; fertility rates from the 1880s; age-specific and parity-specific measures from the 191Os; cumulative fertility measures by birth year of parent beginning with the 1890s; and cumulative fertility measures for marriages by year contracted from the 1910s.The decline in fertility to the 1930s, the upswing to 1961, and declines thereafter revealed by annual fertility measures show far more variation than do measures of total generation fertility—2.7 children per woman born in 1893–95, 2.3 1906–10, 2.8 1921–25, and perhaps 3.0 for women born in the 1930s. Both annual and generation measures show a younger age at parenthood, a decrease in childlessness, and progressively fewer large families. In the light of present experience, it seems not unreasonable to project generation fertility of 2.5 children, implying a crude birth rate of about 20 per thousand for the next fifteen years or so.     

Healthy children in families affected by AIDS: Epidemiological and psychosocial considerations

Traditional means of conceptualizing the psychosocial impact of AIDS have emphasized infected individuals out of their natural context AIDS occurs not simply within hospitals but within families. A secondary morbidity occurs within a family system when one of its members is infected. Clinical experience suggests that non-infected children within families with AIDS are at significant risk for poor developmental outcomes as a consequence of the skewing of familial resources. Children living in families who have a member infected by HIV are impacted by isues such as stigma, isolation, abandonment, and death. This article explores the epidemiology of this child population and risk factors that render them vulnerable. Social workers are in a unique position to identify and serve these children in such diverse settings as schools, welfare agencies, and hospitals. Suggested interventions based on the developmental stage of the child are discussed as are implications for policy formation and program development.     

A Grasp for Aircraft Routing in Response to Groundings and Delays

This paper presents a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) to reconstruct aircraft routings in response to groundings and delays experienced over the course of the day. Whenever the schedule is disrupted, the immediate objective of the airlines is to minimize the cost of reassigning aircraft to flights taking into account available resources and other system constraints. Associated costs are measured by flight delays and cancellations.In the procedure, the neighbors of an incumbent solution are generated and evaluated, and the most desirable are placed on a restricted candidate list. One is selected randomly and becomes the incumbent. The heuristic is polynomial with respect to the number of flights and aircraft. This is reflected in our computational experience with data provided by Continental Airlines. Empirical results demonstrate the ability of the GRASP to quickly explore a wide range of scenarios and, in most cases, to produce an optimal or near-optimal solution.     

Planning for physical distribution

Traditionally under-managed and poorly represented in the decision taking hierarchy, the physical distribution function of many manufacturing companies has not been strong on long range planning. With its basic input, the plans of production and marketing activities, vulnerable to a host of fluctuating outside factors, and with the present economic situation making any kind of planning extremely difficult, planning for Physical Distribution activity must be cautious yet flexible in the coming decade.