The Effects of Group Living in a Residential Home for the Elderly

Summary The group-living system of care is becoming increasingly popularin residential homes for the elderly. This study examined purposefulactivity, as measured by engagement, in one such home beforeand after changeover to group living. It was found that engagementwas significantly increased after the changeover. In addition,life satisfaction was increased and orientation unchanged bythe changeover in a small sample of residents. These resultsare interpreted as supportive for the effectiveness of groupliving.     

Large Deviations Analysis of Extinction in Branching Models

Cramer's classical theorem is applied to obtain large deviations in branching processes. This is a new avenue for analysis of models in discrete and continuous time. For the Galton-Watson process a new formula for the rate function in terms of the Legendre transform of its offspring distribution is derived. Further analysis of the approximate path to extinction produces a new interesting formula.     

Literature review of material flow control mechanisms

We review mechanisms which control the flow or material into and within a manufacturing line. These material flow control (MFC) mechanisms address the problem of when to release material into a manufacturing line and when workcentres should be authorized to produce. The MFC mechanisms reviewed include: Kanban, CONWIP, workload regulating, starvation avoidance, BORA, maximum load limit, MRP, the base stock system, workload control, and production authorization cards.     

A Challenge to Critical Understandings of Race

In this article, I demonstrate fundamental weaknesses in the ability of critical understandings of race to produce reliable knowledge of how social actors use social comparisons as a way to align self with ingroup. I trace these weaknesses to two sources: The first is relying on social status as an explanation for race‐based assessments, ingroup motivations, and social constructions of otherness. This is opposed to leaning on assessments grounded in social psychological research that links properties of human cognition to the development and maintenance of social identities. The second weakness is an open support for activist research that is often situated in radical multiculturalism. Because critical race scholars openly side with racial minorities’ interests, they tend to establish incomplete assessments of social behaviors and social constructs linked to racial identities in order to maintain their stated political allegiances. To demonstrate these and other weaknesses, I draw upon the theoretical insights of social identity theory which is used to reassess Bell and Hartmann's (2007) critical race analysis of diversity dialogue in American society.     

Beyond Transparency: Information Overload and a Model for Intelligibility

The role and evaluation of the modern corporation is being challenged by multiple stakeholders, changing markets and public expectations. Unfortunately, corporate governance, regulation and accounting have played a prominent role in business failure for the past decade resulting in a growing lack of public confidence in our markets. We present a new model that contributes to improving the quality of corporate information by providing not more, but better information through increased intelligibility of overall information, benefiting both the firm and its broad array of stakeholders. It has become apparent that boards, management and regulators have been unable to cope with the rise of business failures by adding increasing layers of regulation that have often served only to exacerbate the complexity and further cloud the transparency of needed information. We have identified a growing number of forward‐thinking firms that have found alternative means to provide betterinformation and strengthen their companies. We offer a stakeholder‐centric model for improving information intelligibility based upon the extensive scope and variety of external input derived from the growing social movement organizations. With the added focus on intelligibility, these groups can help foster greater corporate responsibility, meaningful transparency, increased stakeholder benefits, and improved overall performance of the firm.     

THE VALIDITY OF THE INDEPENDENT INCREMENTS ASSUMPTION FOR PRODUCTION: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF AN AUTOMOTIVE ASSEMBLY PLANT

In assembly plants, random line stoppages cause production variability. For analytic tractability and data availability, researchers commonly assume that the production process possesses the independent increments property (necessary for a process to be Poisson). If the production process has independent increments, then the production in any interval is independent of the production in any other nonoverlapping interval. This property means, for one thing, that the current period's production is never influenced by previous production periods. Intuition, however, suggests that current production could be correlated to past production-violating this assumption of independence. If production problems persist from one period to the next, then one would expect the production in adjacent time periods to be correlated. Although the independent increments property is oflen assumed, its validity has not been demonstrated in practice. We analyze data from an automotive assembly plant to assess the validity of the independent increments assumption for its production.     

DETECTION OF TURNING POINTS IN A TIME SERIES

Consider a time series for which, over a finite interval, there is a model that provides an adequate forecast of the series. Without loss of genality one can take the series over this period of time to have mean O and variance s̀². At some time the underlying process changes to some other model. The previous model no longer produces errors with mean zero. It is assumed, however, that the variance remains s̀². The problem considered here is to detect the change in the process as quickly as possible after it happens. The technique is a computationally feasible extension of Wald's [14] sequential analysis, to develop a parabolic mask centered over the most recent cumulative sum (“cusum”) of the forecast errors. Detection occurs when any previous point in the series of cusums lies outside the parabola. The technique is illustrated by an APL program applied to the logarithms of weekly changes in closing prices for IBM common stock on the New York Stock Exchange over the period 1968–1970.     

A STUDY OF TIMING AND WITHDRAWALS OF STUDENT ADMISSIONS APPLICATIONS*

This study explores two important characteristics of admissions applications to an M.B.A. and M.P.A. program: the timing of applications throughout the year preceding entrance, and the withdrawal rate by students whose applications have been accepted. Specifically, for the years 1961 through 1967, the aggregate patterns of timing and withdrawals (across all applications) are compared to the corresponding data for four groups of applications, ranging from low quality to high quality. (Quality is measured in terms of a first-year predicted grade point average, and is estimated by a linear regression equation using the applicant's total ATGSB score and his undergraduate grade point average.) The results are in the expected directions: “better” students tend to apply earlier, and also have a higher tendency to withdraw after their applications have been accepted. Potential usefulness of the results in forecasting total applications and estimating withdrawal rates is explored.