The development of personal space in primary school children

Personal space in school cafeteria queues was observed for 1,047 children in kindergarten through sixth grade in seven public schools. It was found that children segregate themselves both racially and sexually in the queues. In three of the schools that were racially mixed, the children stood closer in the lower grades than in the higher grades, they stood closer to same-sex children than to other-sex children, but there was no racial difference. In three of the schools where all of the children were white, there was an increase in personal space across grades for all sex combinations except male to male. In two of the schools where all of the children were black, there was no significant increase in personal space across grades. The children in the white schools had greater queue distances than children in the black schools throughout the upper grades. In general, the results were similar to those obtained in other studies involving observation in natural settings and different from results obtained using simulated interaction.     

Optimizing Service Attributes: The Seller's Utility Problem*

Service designers predict market share and sales for their new designs by estimating consumer utilities. The service's technical features (for example, overnight parcel delivery), its price, and the nature of consumer interactions with the service delivery system influence those utilities. Price and the service's technical features are usually quite objective and readily ascertained by the consumer. However, consumer perceptions about their interactions with the service delivery system are usually far more subjective. Furthermore, service designers can only hope to influence those perceptions indirectly through their decisions about nonlinear processes such as employee recruiting, training, and scheduling policies. Like the service's technical features, these process choices affect quality perceptions, market share, revenues, costs, and profits. We propose a heuristic for the NP‐hard service design problem that integrates realistic service delivery cost models with conjoint analysis. The resulting seller's utility function links expected profits to the intensity of a service's influential attributes and also reveals an ideal setting or level for each service attribute. In tests with simulated service design problems, our proposed configurations compare quite favorably with the designs suggested by other normative service design heuristics.     

A NOTE ON INTEGRATING INVENTORY AND PRODUCT SALES-MIX MODELS

In a recent issue of Decision Sciences, Raiborn and Harris [2] discussed the integration of inventory and product sales-mix models. While they formulated a model which reflected some of the interactions between product sales-mix and inventory decisions, the purpose of this note is to point out deficiencies in their decision rule analysis for solving such integrated models.     

Emergency risk communication and sensemaking during smoke events: A survey of practitioners

Emergency risk communication (ERC) for smoke emitted from major fires continues to challenge governments. During these events, practitioners (including scientific, communication, and emergency response government staff) are tasked with quickly making sense of the public health risks and the communication options available. Practitioners’ sensemaking—the process of creating meaning from information about an unfolding emergency—is key to effective ERC. This article identifies the factors that ERC practitioners consider the most important to their sensemaking for smoke events. A survey of practitioners (n = 86) was conducted to elicit their views on the level of importance of 22 different factors (individual, organizational, and contextual) on their sensemaking. The results indicate that the majority of the factors tested are very important to practitioners. This finding likely reflects the multidimensional nature of emergency smoke events and provides evidence as to why practitioners are challenged when trying to make sense of emergency situations. Despite multiple factors being considered very important to practitioners, the time-limited nature of emergencies means that practitioners will inevitability be forced to prioritize in their sensemaking efforts. Our results also provide insight into practitioners’ prioritization of different information sources. Specifically, practitioners prioritize their own knowledge and the knowledge of other practitioners. The two most important factors were information from other incident management stakeholders and the practitioners’ past experience. Other information, including community-based and academic knowledge, appear to be of lower priority for practitioners. Based on the study results, recommendations for practice and future research are discussed.