The project coordinator's problem

A project coordinator has a set of activities with known durations and values which are available for scheduling within a given horizon. There may be both precedence and corequisite restrictions (two activities are corequisites if scheduling one implies the other must be scheduled). The project coordinator's problem is to select the activities to be scheduled, and their start times, so as to maximize the net value of the project when there is no penalty for failing to schedule an activity. An efficient solution procedure is developed and illustrated and several generalizations are discussed.     

Public response to the 1970 census: A Wisconsin survey

The 1970 census included numerous procedural innovations, of which the most important was the use of mail-out/mail-back techniques. A statewide survey of Wisconsin households (conducted in May and June, 1970) included questions designed to elicit information on the degree of cooperation rendered, ease of comprehension of the form, possible objectionable items on the census, whether or not contacts were made by enumerators, and respondent judgments of the adequacy of enumerators’ performance. The results indicate that Wisconsin respondents tended to comply with census procedures, that they found very little difficulty in filling out the mailed forms, and that they regarded the census enumerators as doing a “good job” in most cases.     

A short term forecasting model for R & D expenditures

Whenever budget requests for individual R & D projects contain a built-in contingency then this will result in inefficient use of scarce resources. At the end of the year the annual budget may have been fully allocated but not necessarily fully utilized. This can result in delays or even complete cancellation of other proposed R & D projects because of an apparent lack of funding.The objective of the study was to forecast monthly R & D expenditures with a better accuracy than available from the subjective estimates of individual project leaders. The method described in this paper proved to be successful in practice.     

Residential redistribution of socioeconomic strata in metropolitan areas

This paper is a preliminary report on an ecological analysis of recent changes in the spatial distribution of socioeconomic strata within 363 Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas (or substituted units) in the United States. The central hypothesis guiding the study is that certain population subgroups in and around the larger urban areas are shifting their residential locations in predictable directions. Changes in the distribution of educational classes between the central city (or cities) and their surrounding rings from 1950 to 1960 are traced by using census data. A special feature of the analysis is the inclusion of 163 "lquasi-metropolitan areas" centered on cities that had 25,000-50,000 inhabitants in 1960.The initial results indicate that residential redistribution according to "social class" is occurring in all these metropolitan areas and that the pattern of change varies systematically. Regional differences are pronounced, and, as prior research has suggested, age of the city and population size appear to be important factors. The percent of adults in the high school and college categories in the rings of older and larger metropolitan areas generally increased disproportionately compared to the central cities. A variety of patterns of change, however, occurred among the younger and smaller metropolitan areas.Subsequent analyses will include (a) alternative methods of controlling color and regional location, (b) other measures of the independent and dependent variables used here, and (c) a multivariate approach to the problem of identifying and assessing the explanatory power of additional independent variables (including population growth, the over-all rate of decentralization, annexation history, economic base, and the character of the ring). The extent as well as the direction of change will also be investigated. Finally, the feasibility of quantifying an "evolutionary sequence" in the distribution of social classes will also receive attention.