民事诉讼快速裁判的法律障碍及其解决思路

越来越严重的诉讼拖延问题无疑是促使法院寻求快速审结民事案件的直接动因,但民事诉讼制度中的缺陷和漏洞已成为法院快速裁判的主要法律障碍。解决问题的基本思路和方法应该是完善我国现有法律和司法解释中存在缺陷的程序和制度,弥补立法和司法解释中的法律漏洞。     

也论哈姆雷特的延宕

哈姆雷特的延宕是莎学界的一个老话题。这一公案中有几个历代学者都关注的焦点,如鬼魂诉说后哈姆雷特为何没立即复仇?"戏中戏"之后哈姆雷特为何没趁克劳狄斯忏悔时复仇?哈姆雷特是否性格忧郁等等。结合着戏剧创作的时代背景和剧情的内在发展逻辑对这些焦点进行分析,便会发现,哈姆雷特不仅未曾延宕,而且他在复仇过程中表现出了机智、勇敢和敢于冒险的精神。     

Optimal Uniform Pricing Strategy of a Service Firm When Facing Two Classes of Customers

When facing heterogeneous customers, how should a service firm make its pricing decision to maximize revenue? If discrimination is allowed, then priority schemes and differentiated pricing are often used to achieve that. In many applications, however, the firm cannot or is not allowed to set discriminatory prices, for example, list price in retail stores, online shopping, and gas stations; thus a uniform price must be applied to all customers. This study addresses the optimal uniform pricing problem of a service firm using a queueing system with two classes of customers. Our result shows that the potential pool of customers plays a central role in the firm's optimal decision. Depending on the range of system parameters, which are determined explicitly by the primitive data, the firm's optimal strategy may choose to serve only one class of customers, a subset of a class of customers, or a combination of different classes of customers. In addition, the optimal price is in general not monotonic with respect to the potential market sizes because their changes may lead to a major shift in the firm's decision on which customer class to serve. However, unless such a shift occurs, the optimal price is weakly decreasing in the potential market sizes.     

Mapping Our Way: New Formations in Technical Services: Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians Annual Conference

Abstract

The annual meeting of the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians (OVGTSL) was held May 16–18, 2007, at the Holiday Inn-University Plaza in Bowling Green, Kentucky. One hundred twenty technical services librarians from Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and points beyond gathered for programming centered around the theme of “Mapping Our Way: New Formations in Technical Services.”     

Adaptive Sequential Preventive Maintenance Policy and Bayesian Consideration

This article proposes an adaptive sequential preventive maintenance (PM) policy for which an improvement factor is newly introduced to measure the PM effect at each PM. For this model, the PM actions are conducted at different time intervals so that an adaptive method needs to be utilized to determine the optimal PM times minimizing the expected cost rate per unit time. At each PM, the hazard rate is reduced by an amount affected by the improvement factor which depends on the number of PM's preceding the current one. We derive mathematical formulas to evaluate the expected cost rate per unit time by incorporating the PM cost, repair cost, and replacement cost. Assuming that the failure times follow a Weibull distribution, we propose an optimal sequential PM policy by minimizing the expected cost rate. Furthermore, we consider Bayesian aspects for the sequential PM policy to discuss its optimality. The effect of some parameters and the functional forms of improvement factor on the optimal PM policy is measured numerically by sensibility analysis and some numerical examples are presented for illustrative purposes.     

An Immigration-Death Process with a Time-Dependent Delay

In this article, a non homogeneous immigration-death process with delay in the death rate parameter is considered. A process with a time-dependent delay is developed and shown to result in a non homogeneous Poisson process.     

Optimization of continuous and discrete scheduled times for a cumulative damage system with age-dependent maintenance

Abstract

This paper presents a preventive replacement problem when a system is operating successive works with random times and suffering stochastic shocks. The works cause random amount additive damage to the system, and the system fails whenever the cumulative damage reaches a failure level threshold. As an external shock occurs, the system experiences one of the two types of shocks with age-dependent maintenance mechanism: type-I (minor) shock is rectified by a minimal repair, or type-II (catastrophic) shock causes the system to fail. To control the deterioration process, preventive replacement is scheduled to replace the system at a continuous age T or at a discrete number N of working cycles, whichever occurs first, and corrective replacement is performed immediately whenever the system fails due to either shock or damage. The optimal preventive replacement schedule that minimizes the expected cost rate is discussed analytically and computed numerically. The proposed model provides a general framework for analyzing maintenance policies and extends several existing results.     

A value of information framework for assessing the trade-offs associated with uncertainty,duration, and cost of chemical toxicity testing

A number of investigators have explored the use of value of information (VOI) analysis to evaluate alternative information collection procedures in diverse decision-making contexts. This paper presents an analytic framework for determining the value of toxicity information used in risk-based decision making. The framework is specifically designed to explore the trade-offs between cost, timeliness, and uncertainty reduction associated with different toxicity-testing methodologies. The use of the proposed framework is demonstrated by two illustrative applications which, although based on simplified assumptions, show the insights that can be obtained through the use of VOI analysis. Specifically, these results suggest that timeliness of information collection has a significant impact on estimates of the VOI of chemical toxicity tests, even in the presence of smaller reductions in uncertainty. The framework introduces the concept of the expected value of delayed sample information, as an extension to the usual expected value of sample information, to accommodate the reductions in value resulting from delayed decision making. Our analysis also suggests that lower cost and higher throughput testing also may be beneficial in terms of public health benefits by increasing the number of substances that can be evaluated within a given budget. When the relative value is expressed in terms of return-on-investment per testing strategy, the differences can be substantial.     

Finding the path beyond reputation repair: A structural topic modeling analysis of the crisis communication paradigm in public relations

This research utilizes computational methods to examine crisis communication scholarship from 2010 to 2020 in two studies with a census of all articles in Public Relations Review and the Journal of Public Relations Research (n = 1293 articles, 7400,685 words). Results indicate crisis scholarship has expanded beyond its prior focus on reputation repair. Situational crisis communication theory and image repair are compared in volume of scholarship and methodological affinity. Social media, SCCT, and media relations are identified as central topics within crisis communication scholarship.     

基于资源流网络优化的Max-npv项目调度

活动拖期通过资源流网络的传递会严重影响项目的净现值收益。针对该问题，本文首先在确定性环境下采用模拟退火算法(SA)构建了Max-NPV(Maximize the Net Present Value)非鲁棒性基准调度计划，然后考虑到活动工期的不确定性，设计了MEPC(Minimize Expected Penalty Cost)资源流网络优化算法，通过鲁棒性资源分配实现净现值期望惩罚成本最小化。大规模仿真对比实验结果表明，在活动工期低、中、高三种不确定性程度下，相对于采用随机资源分配算法(SA+RRAS)构建的非鲁棒性调度计划，SA+MEPC算法构建的鲁棒性调度计划在项目净现值实际收益、调度计划的“解”鲁棒性和“质”鲁棒性三个方面都取得了更好的结果，并且应对活动拖期风险的能力也更强。