酒店公关：讲求高度平衡力

酒店公关可谓不少人羡慕的工作,每次他们出现都是谈吐得体、遏事淡定、仪表出众,而且又在豪华星级酒店工作。不过,马哥孛罗酒店公关经理Virginia表示这只是别人看到的美丽表面,其实酒店公关的工作十分繁重,经常要平衡不同方面的需要及期望,需要极高的平衡力。     

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.     

A comparison of attitudes about cremation among Black and White middle-aged and older adults

Social workers must be instrumental in educating elders and their families to make informed decisions about death and dying. As part of a larger qualitative study, we explored attitudes about cremation of 25 older and 25 middle-aged adults, evenly split between Black and White respondents. Major themes emerged about disposition of the body after death. Costs and land conservation influenced support for cremation; reasons against cremation include religious beliefs, lack of closure, and sense of place. Additionally, some respondents were against cremation primarily because of lack of exposure, as it was not their family tradition, suggesting a role for education.     

The essential ranking of decision rules in small panels of experts

For small panels of experts (e.g., boards of managers, courts, specialized committees), n 5, this paper provides an algorithm for ranking the seven efficient and commonly used weighted majority rules by their respective performance. These rules are terned efficient since they constitute the set of potentially optimal decision rules in uncertain, symmetric, pairwise choice situations. The main contribution of this study is the discovery of an essential ordering of six of these rules which entails that the set of possible ranking of the seven rules is almost single peaked.The essential ordering significantly reduces the number of possible rankings of the rules, and thus, simplifies the development of the ranking algorithm. The essential ordering has important applications when the available information on the experts' decisional skills is incomplete.     

Anticipating Likely Consequences of Lottery‐Based Affirmative Action*

Objectives. To better understand the consequences of whole or partial reliance on test scores as a screening mechanism for college or university admissions or for job placement or promotion. Methods. We introduce a simple hurdles/threshold model to study one particular mechanism that has been recently proposed to generate a “compromise” between race‐normed or gender‐normed standards for acceptance, on the one hand, and the decision to select those with the highest score regardless of race or gender, on the other—a method we call lottery‐based rules with minimum thresholds of acceptance. Results. We show the factors that determine how close acceptance rates for the disadvantaged group under lottery‐based methods will be to the acceptance rates under either race‐normal or pretest‐score‐based mechanisms. Conclusions. We argue that the likely consequences of using this method are not nearly as attractive as they might first appear to reformers.     

An avian urban morphotype: how the city environment shapes great tit morphology at different life stages

Urban Ecosystems - Urbanization is a worldwide phenomenon associated with tremendous modifications of natural habitats. Understanding how city dwelling species are affected by those changes is...     

Nonparametric asymptotic confidence intervals for extreme quantiles

In this paper, we propose new asymptotic confidence intervals for extreme quantiles, that is, for quantiles located outside the range of the available data. We restrict ourselves to the situation where the underlying distribution is heavy-tailed. While asymptotic confidence intervals are mostly constructed around a pivotal quantity, we consider here an alternative approach based on the distribution of order statistics sampled from a uniform distribution. The convergence of the coverage probability to the nominal one is established under a classical second-order condition. The finite sample behavior is also examined and our methodology is applied to a real dataset.     

Personality predictors of career exploration: A meta-analysis

In this meta-analysis, correlations of personality traits and career decision-making self-efficacy with self and environmental career exploration were estimated across 71 samples and a pairwise sample of 19,846. Traits included the Big Five personality traits, shyness, locus of control, vocational decision styles, and stress. Many measures of career exploration were based on scores of self and environmental exploration on the Career Exploration Survey. Results varied by characteristics with the largest effects for locus of control, vocational decision style: thinking-feeling and self-efficacy. Environmental exploration and self-exploration were moderately correlated and demonstrated different relations with traits that were consistent with theory. Self-exploration was related to openness to experience and unrelated to extraversion, while environmental exploration was correlated with extraversion. Both were similarly correlated with conscientiousness such that conscientious individuals were more likely to engage in career exploration.     

A new measure of linear local dependence

A new local dependence function based on regression concepts is introduced. This function can characterize the dependence structure of two random variables localized at the fixed point. Some properties of the local dependence function are given. Examples of important bivariate distributions are provided.