Finding and Implementing Energy Efficiency Projects in Industrial Facilities

This study addresses the challenges of finding and implementing profitable energy efficiency (EE) projects, a critical foundation for sustainable operations. We focus on manufacturing enterprises, but many of our findings apply also to the back office of service operations. Our starting point is that, in nearly every industrial enterprise, there are many profitable EE projects that could be implemented but are not. An oft‐cited hindrance to implementation is the lack of an internal management framework in which to find, value, and execute these projects. Using a conceptual approach, we rely on proven sustainable operations tools to develop such a framework. We identify three major value drivers of EE projects: savings intensity, “green” image, and project complexity. We then describe a framework for understanding the context of EE projects in industry, with an underlying analytic foundation in optimal portfolio analysis. A case study of a large manufacturing site is used to illustrate emerging best practices—based on Kaizen management principles—for integrating EE project management with operations, engineering, and strategy.     

Governmentality and Lifestyle Studies

In recent years, a research focus on lifestyles has drawn considerable attention from many quarters. Within this area, the influence of several European and continental intellectual currents not widely embraced in American sociology can be detected, some traceable to the work of Michel Foucault. This article will provide a summary and overview of one area of lifestyle sociology that is touched by Foucault's broad influence on the social sciences, particularly his theories on governmentality. Governmentality studies consider the manner in which personal autonomy and self-responsibility is conveyed to individuals as an ongoing life-project. Through the lens of governmentality studies, everyday lifestyle choices of individuals are viewed as elements of larger projects of self-development, implemented by therapeutic discourses of risk management, self-realization, and enhanced personal well-being. After a summary of debates within the sociology of lifestyle informed by governmentality theories, commentary and recommendations will be offered on new directions in governmentality research focusing on subjective well-being or 'happiness' as a feature of contemporary lifestyles and as an object of sociological research. A brief survey of new research comprising the interdisciplinary field of 'happiness studies' suggests a new direction not only for lifestyle research, but for governmentality studies as well.     

The abortion issue and Title VII employment discrimination: The microcosm of the law

This paper presents a discussion of a 1989 United States federal appeals court ruling in the case of Doe v. First National Bank. The case is the first ruling on the federal appellate level involving a claim of Title VII employment discrimination based upon alleged employer knowledge of and animus towards an employee who had undergone an abortion. Doe raises the ethical questions of how a highly charged, national social issue can be reduced to interpersonal dealings between a supervisor and her subordinate in the workplace. The facts of the case are presented in a chronological manner, followed by a discussion of both the court rulings in the case and the utility of employing this case as an excellent tool in the teaching of business ethics and society.     

A lower-bound oracle inequality for a blockwise-shrinkage estimate

Efromovich-Pinsker and Stein blockwise-shrinkage estimates are traditionally studied via upper-bound oracle inequalities, which bound the estimate's risk from above by the oracle's risk plus a remainder term. These bounds allow one to establish sufficient conditions for attaining the oracle's risk. To explore necessary conditions, this article develops a lower-bound oracle inequality, which bounds the estimate's risk from below by the oracle's risk minus a remainder term. In particular, the lower bound implies that thresholds must vanish for attaining the oracle's risk.     

Exploring the Hierarchical Structure of Pacific Identity and Wellbeing

To understand outcomes for Pacific peoples in New Zealand we need to further our psychological knowledge of the relationship between Pacific identity and wellbeing. We map the hierarchical organization of Pacific identity and wellbeing using a novel top-down factor analytic approach applied to the Pacific Identity and Wellbeing Scale (PIWBS; N = 586). Analyses indicated that Pacific identity experiences were organized within two broad dimensions reflecting Identity Engagement and Cultural Wellbeing. Critically, our analysis showed that Religious Centrality and Embeddedness emerged jointly from these dual broad domains. Religious identification provides a bridging link between identity and wellbeing for Pacific peoples. Identifying the relationships of Pacific identity and wellbeing factors, and how religious identification emerges jointly from these two broad domains, provides valuable information in how the Pacific self may be cognitively organized and may assist in future research directions in this area. We assert that this general statistical model provides broad conceptual insights into how Pacific peoples experience their identity and culture, and how this relates to various social indicators of health and wellbeing at a broad, theoretical level. In particular, we offer a conceptual analysis of possible insights from our hierarchical model of identity and wellbeing for understanding Pacific suicide in New Zealand.     

Adaptive Estimation of the Integral of Squared Regression Derivatives

A problem of estimating the integral of a squared regression function and of its squared derivatives has been addressed in a number of papers. For the case of a heteroscedastic model where smoothness of the underlying regression function, the design density, and the variance of errors are known, the asymptotically sharp minimax lower bound and a sharp estimator were found in Pastuchova & Khasminski (1989). However, there are apparently no results on the either rate optimal or sharp optimal adaptive, or data-driven, estimation when neither the degree of regression function smoothness nor design density, scale function and distribution of errors are known. After a brief review of main developments in non-parametric estimation of non-linear functionals, we suggest a simple adaptive estimator for the integral of a squared regression function and its derivatives and prove that it is sharp-optimal whenever the estimated derivative is sufficiently smooth.     

The contributions of welfare typologies to international social work practices

This paper is concerned with the link between studies of welfare typologies and studies of international social work. Its objective is to show how welfare typologies could be used to strengthen the role of international social work practices to support international exchange of ideas on welfare issues. To meet this objective, three analytical tasks are implemented. The first task is to show that professional imperialism could weaken the potential of international social work practices to promote international exchange of ideas on welfare issues. The second task is to discuss the importance of welfare typologies in supporting the development of international social work by challenging professional imperialism. The third task is to discuss a research project on a defamilization typology. This project provides empirical evidence of the contributions made by welfare typologies to international social work practices.     

The Functional Analysis of Psychological Terms: The Symmetry Problem

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - Skinner (1945) proposed an empirical research program in which subjective, mentalistic, or psychological terms from ordinary language could be analyzed in terms of...     

Individual Differences in Infant Oculomotor Behavior During the Viewing of Complex Naturalistic Scenes

Little research hitherto has examined how individual differences in attention, as assessed using standard experimental paradigms, relate to individual differences in how attention is spontaneously allocated in more naturalistic contexts. Here, we analyzed the time intervals between refoveating eye movements (fixation durations) while typically developing 11‐month‐old infants viewed a 90‐min battery ranging from complex dynamic to noncomplex static materials. The same infants also completed experimental assessments of cognitive control, psychomotor reaction times (RT), processing speed (indexed via peak look during habituation), and arousal (indexed via tonic pupil size). High test–retest reliability was found for fixation duration, across testing sessions and across types of viewing material. Increased cognitive control and increased arousal were associated with reduced variability in fixation duration. For fixations to dynamic stimuli, in which a large proportion of saccades may be exogenously cued, we found that psychomotor RT measures were most predictive of mean fixation duration; for fixations to static stimuli, in contrast, in which there is less exogenous attentional capture, we found that psychomotor RT did not predict performance, but that measures of cognitive control and arousal did. The implications of these findings for understanding the development of attentional control in naturalistic settings are discussed.