Creating offshore-ready it professionals: A global perspective and strong collaborative skills are needed

Outsourcing of IT functions has become a widespread corporate practice, which has naturally led to concerns among IT works about how this affects their jobs. The issue is complex, and many companies are bringing their IT functions back inhouse. In light of this complexity, what skills do IT workers need to be com-petitive? We address this question first by reviewing the literature and then by examining two corporate case studies that have dealt with outsourcing issues. Based on this view of outsourcing, we discuss the skills that can provide a com-petitive advantage in the current environment.     

Determinants and Consequences of Social Trust*

This article provides an overview of social trust, examining its various aspects and components. Trust is best understood in a sociological sense by focusing on its important relational characteristic. Following this lead, the article discusses briefly how social trust relates to social capital and examines factors that shape the development of social trust, along with outcomes related to variations in trust, classifying them by analytical level (i.e., individual, community, group, organizational, and societal). The article concludes by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of existing research and by identifying some important questions that have not yet been adequately addressed.     

土木工程类复合型执业人才培养的研究与实践

根据复合型执业人才培养模式的要求,对土木工程专业理论课程教学内容进行合并、增删、优化组合;在实践教学环节方面,安排大四学生在施工现场实践近1年,由项目经理、工程监理和发包方驻地工程师进行综合指导。理论与实践紧密结合的复合型执业人才培养的改革实践获得了极好的效果。     

International guidelines and the inclusion of disabled people. The Ugandan story

Uganda has made much progress towards including disabled people in its mainstream development, particularly in the political agenda. The exact process by which this has been achieved and the relationship between this and international guidelines and legislation are not known. This study undertakes to examine this from two specific perspectives: (1) How do international documents relevant to disabled people relate to national legislation in Uganda? (2) What can this comparison, together with the perceptions of stakeholders, tell us about how the legislation and services could improve? International legislation and Ugandan legislation is reviewed and compared. Data from 5 semi‐structured key informant interviews and 6 focus group discussions involving a total of 38 people are collected and analysed. The themes arising from the data are related to the documents, legislation, policies and other relevant literature. The results examine the barriers to service provision; the role of change; the importance of representation; policy and legislation issues; and the effects of devolution. Five specific findings relate to how legislation and services can improve: more resources to increase access for disabled people; strong leadership and collaboration between Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) funding bodies and governments; awareness raising and training; representation from all impairment groups; and raising the profile of disabled people through further legislation.     

Use of Technology in Delivering Career Services Worldwide

The authors review the trends in the use of computers in the delivery and support of career guidance and counseling identified at the symposium International Perspectives on Career Development. The papers presented emphasized that 20th‐century computer‐based systems continue to be used, mainly delivered via the World Wide Web. These systems are enhanced through audio, video, graphics, strategies to provide needs assessment, and support by cybercounselors or expert system design. The papers also revealed a new trend: the use of elegant Web sites to store and search immense libraries of resources needed by professionals and clients and to facilitate communication and collaboration among professionals in cyberspace. Concerns, issues, and resources related to many areas, including the readiness of clients to use computer‐based systems, were also raised; existing sources of guidelines are noted.     

Silphids in urban forests: Diversity and function

Many ecologists have examined the process of how urbanization reduces biological diversity but rarely have its ecological consequences been assessed. We studied forest-dwelling burying beetles (Coleoptera: Silphidae)—a guild of insects that requires carrion to complete their life cycles—along an urban-rural gradient of land use in Maryland. Our objective was to determine how forest fragmentation associated with urbanization affects (1) beetle community diversity and structure and (2) the ecological function provided by these insects, that is, decomposition of vertebrate carcasses. Forest fragmentation strongly reduced burying beetle diversity and abundance, and did so far more pervasively than urbanization of the surrounding landscape. The likelihood that beetles interred experimental baits was a direct, positive function of burying beetle diversity. We conclude that loss of burying beetle diversity resulting from forest fragmentation could have important ecological consequences in urban forests.     

HEAVY-TAILED-DISTRIBUTED THRESHOLD STOCHASTIC VOLATILITY MODELS IN FINANCIAL TIME SERIES

To capture mean and variance asymmetries and time‐varying volatility in financial time series, we generalize the threshold stochastic volatility (THSV) model and incorporate a heavy‐tailed error distribution. Unlike existing stochastic volatility models, this model simultaneously accounts for uncertainty in the unobserved threshold value and in the time‐delay parameter. Self‐exciting and exogenous threshold variables are considered to investigate the impact of a number of market news variables on volatility changes. Adopting a Bayesian approach, we use Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to estimate all unknown parameters and latent variables. A simulation experiment demonstrates good estimation performance for reasonable sample sizes. In a study of two international financial market indices, we consider two variants of the generalized THSV model, with US market news as the threshold variable. Finally, we compare models using Bayesian forecasting in a value‐at‐risk (VaR) study. The results show that our proposed model can generate more accurate VaR forecasts than can standard models.     

Real nonparametric regression using complex wavelets

Summary.  Wavelet shrinkage is an effective nonparametric regression technique, especially when the underlying curve has irregular features such as spikes or discontinuities. The basic idea is simple: take the discrete wavelet transform of data consisting of a signal corrupted by noise; shrink or remove the wavelet coefficients to remove the noise; then invert the discrete wavelet transform to form an estimate of the true underlying curve. Various researchers have proposed increasingly sophisticated methods of doing this by using real-valued wavelets. Complex-valued wavelets exist but are rarely used. We propose two new complex-valued wavelet shrinkage techniques: one based on multiwavelet style shrinkage and the other using Bayesian methods. Extensive simulations show that our methods almost always give significantly more accurate estimates than methods based on real-valued wavelets. Further, our multiwavelet style shrinkage method is both simpler and dramatically faster than its competitors. To understand the excellent performance of this method we present a new risk bound on its hard thresholded coefficients.