The World's Changing Human Capital Stock: Multi‐State Population Projections by Educational Attainment

This research note presents the first global population projections by educational attainment using methods of multi‐state population projection. The educational composition of the population by age and sex and educational fertility differentials are estimated for 13 world regions, and alternative scenarios are presented to the year 2030. One of these scenarios assumes constant educational transition rates and the other assumes that all regions reach Northern American levels of enrollment rates by 2030. The strong momentum or, as the case may be, inertia in the transformation of the educational composition of a population, seen in the results, arises because education is mostly acquired at a young age. The sex bias in the educational composition, especially evident in some developing countries, is unlikely to disappear soon. China has made remarkable progress in improving educational enrollment and as a consequence by 2030 is expected to have more educated people of working age than Europe and Northern America together.     

Struktur und Beziehung in gruppalen Settings

Structure and relationship in group settings Working in and with groups involves always working with the relationships between the group members, even when it is not intended to influence them. The individual interactions within the group tend to develop enduring patterns, which may provide important resources of realization of the group objects, but also strong resistances. A knowledge of the inherent regularities of the communication and role structures and of the development of relationships represents an essential competence in working effectively with groups and teams.     

On (n-l)-wise and joint independence and normality of n Random variables: an example

An example is given of a vector of n random variables such that any (n-1)-dimensional subvector consists of n-1 independent standard normal variables. The whole vector however is neither independent nor normal.     

Subjective Attendants of Unification and Transformation in Germany

The article is concentrated on negative aspects of quality of life, mainly anomie. Anomic attitudes have been thematized since the beginning of sociological analysis as phenomena accompanying rapid social change and economic crises. It is shown to what extent the processes of unification and transformation in Germany after 1990 are accompanied by a fragile perceived quality of life. That such a problematic has become virulent at the beginning of the nineteen-nineties indicates the fact that the unification of Germany and the transformation process of the former socialist states are undoubtedly part of the great rapid societal changes of the past decades.     

Illegitimate tasks as a source of work stress

Illegitimate tasks represent a task-level stressor derived from role and justice theories within the framework of “Stress-as–Offense-to-Self” (SOS; Semmer, Jacobshagen, Meier, & Elfering, 2007). Tasks are illegitimate if they violate norms about what an employee can properly be expected to do, because they are perceived as unnecessary or unreasonable; they imply a threat to one's professional identity. We report three studies testing associations between illegitimate tasks and well-being/strain. In two cross-sectional studies, illegitimate tasks predicted low self-esteem, feelings of resentment towards one's organization and burnout, controlling for role conflict, distributive injustice and social stressors in Study 1, and for distributive and procedural/interactional justice in Study 2. In Study 3, illegitimate tasks predicted two strain variables (feelings of resentment towards one's organization and irritability) over a period of two months, controlling for initial values of strain. Results confirm the unique contribution of illegitimate tasks to well-being and strain, beyond the effects of other predictors. Moreover, Study 3 demonstrated that illegitimate tasks predicted strain, rather than being predicted by it. We therefore conclude that illegitimate tasks represent an aspect of job design that deserves more attention, both in research and in decisions about task assignments.     

Deletions in random binary search trees: A story of errors

The usual assumptions for the average case analysis of binary search trees (BSTs) are random insertions and random deletions. If a BST is built by n random insertions the expected number of key comparisons necessary to access a node is 2 ln n+O(1). This well-known result is already contained in the first papers on such ‘random’ BSTs. However, if random insertions are intermixed with random deletions the analysis of the resulting BST seems to become more intricate. At least this is the impression one gets from the related publications since 1962, and it is quite appropriate to speak of a story of errors in this context, as will be seen in the present survey paper, giving an overview on this story.     

Modelling price paths in on-line auctions: smoothing sparse and unevenly sampled curves by using semiparametric mixed models

Summary.  On-line auctions pose many challenges for the empirical researcher, one of which is the effective and reliable modelling of price paths. We propose a novel way of modelling price paths in eBay's on-line auctions by using functional data analysis. One of the practical challenges is that the functional objects are sampled only very sparsely and unevenly. Most approaches rely on smoothing to recover the underlying functional object from the data, which can be difficult if the data are irregularly distributed. We present a new approach that can overcome this challenge. The approach is based on the ideas of mixed models. Specifically, we propose a semiparametric mixed model with boosting to recover the functional object. As well as being able to handle sparse and unevenly distributed data, the model also results in conceptually more meaningful functional objects. In particular, we motivate our method within the framework of eBay's on-line auctions. On-line auctions produce monotonic increasing price curves that are often correlated across auctions. The semiparametric mixed model accounts for this correlation in a parsimonious way. It also manages to capture the underlying monotonic trend in the data without imposing model constraints. Our application shows that the resulting functional objects are conceptually more appealing. Moreover, when used to forecast the outcome of an on-line auction, our approach also results in more accurate price predictions compared with standard approaches. We illustrate our model on a set of 183 closed auctions for Palm M515 personal digital assistants.     

Restrictive Control and Information Pathologies in Organizations

Although the relation of power to knowledge is an often discussed theme, a psychological and sociological scrutiny of the issue is lacking. A new conceptual and theoretical approach to this issue is presented here that distingushes between restrictive and promotive control. Restrictive control is a form of power exertion in which one actor pushes his wishes through against the interests of another actor. In contrast, if an actor influences the other in line with his or her interests, this is called promotive control. Information pathologies, i.e., avoidable failures of distributed information processing, are introduced as an inverse measure for the quality and quantity of knowledge production. It is hypothesized that restrictive control has negative consequences for the production of new or better knowledge, because it induces information pathologies that in turn lower the effectiveness of joint action. These two hypotheses are tested in a study on 21 successful and 21 unsuccessful innovations with a dual qualitative and quantitative approach. The interpretive analysis of interviews with the main actors of each innovation case as well as the statistical analysis of questionnaire responses by the same actors strongly corroborate both hypotheses. Methodological problems, theoretical perspectives, and practical consequences are discussed.