Nonverbal cues employed in discriminating between disabled persons and actors

Undergraduate subjects were seen to accurately discriminate between simulating actors and genuinely disabled males confined to wheelchairs. Judgments were based on skill in manipulating the wheelchair, poorer muscular development of the disabled, and on appearance of clothing. Implications for research on the disabled employing actors was discussed.This study was supported by a grant from the York University Faculty of Arts awarded to the first two authors. The project was performed as the third author's Honours thesis. The authors wish to thank all participants for their cooperation and assistance in making this research possible. The authors also wish to thank Gail Kenyon, Coordinator of the Centre for Handicapped Students who helped recruit participants for the videotaping and to Lucie Cantrell, Executive Officer of the York University Counselling and Development Centre who arranged for the use of the Centre's facilities and equipment.     

Errors in Estimates of Smoking-Related Deaths Derived from Nonsmoker Mortality

A number of recent analyses have computed present and future costs associated with a risk by estimating what would happen if the risk were absent. Two sources of bias are associated with this approach: (1) differences in confounding factors between present risk avoiders and risk takers, and (2) the difficulty of selecting an unbiased sample of risk avoiders. A staff memo from the Office of Technology Assessment used this approach to estimate mortality due to smoking. Numbers of deaths and age at death distributions of U.S. smokers and nonsmokers for all causes, all cancers, lung cancers, heart disease, and cerebrovascular lesions are used to assess the accuracy of these estimates. Large errors in the OTA estimates are found. Conditions are discussed that might help reduce errors from this approach.     

Using expected values to simplify decision making under uncertainty

A simulation study examines the impact of a simplification strategy that replaces distributional attribute evaluations with their expected values and uses those expectations in an additive value model. Several alternate simplified forms and approximation approaches are investigated, with results showing that in general the simplified models are able to provide acceptable performance that is fairly robust to a variety of internal and external environmental changes, including changes to the distributional forms of the attribute evaluations, errors in the assessment of the expected values, and problem size. Certain of the simplified models are shown to be highly sensitive to the form of the underlying preference functions, and in particular to extreme non-linearity in these preferences.     

再论文化工业

该文是阿多尔诺于1963年撰写的再论文化工业的重要文章。他指出,为了避免"大众文化"的通常诠释,必须用"文化工业"代替"大众文化"概念。大众文化,即文化工业并不是从大众自身中自发成长起来的、服务于大众的通俗文化,也不是大众艺术的当代形态;而是为大众消费量身定制的、并在很大程度上规定着消费本身的文化工业产品,是技术化、标准化、商品化的娱乐工业体系,具有重复性、齐一性、欺骗性、辩护性、强制性等特征。尽管它在某种程度上能够填充人们的生活,但本质上是为了经济利益(即利润)而人为地制造出来的。因此,它试图通过人为刺激的虚假消费满足给人们带来虚假幸福,但最终成为一种消除了人的反叛意识、维护现存社会秩序的意识形态,从而阻碍了个性的形成发展和人的解放。     

The Challenge of Agricultural Sustainability for Asia and Europe

It is expected that climate change (CC), growing population, increasing urbanization and improving living standards are amongst the major drivers influencing future agricultural development needs. Under conventional agricultural systems, the main sources of growth in crop production are well known. Beyond suffering its consequences, agriculture has been shown to act as a driver of CC, primarily through the production and release of about 15% of the atmospheric greenhouse gases but also by altering the resilience of the agro-ecosystems. The main criterion for the production systems called conservation agriculture (CA) is the provision of an optimum environment in the root-zone to maximum possible depth. Under CA the water-holding capacity of the soil increases, and water losses are reduced. CA combined with other complementary techniques can also help reduce the emissions for methane and nitrous oxides and at the same time it can improve rural and socio-economic development.     

Goal directed benchmarking for organizational efficiency

In this paper, we extend the standard data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to include longer term top management goals. This extension is in recognition of the fact that benchmarking for decision making units (DMUs) is more than a purely monitoring process, and includes a component of future planning. The new model uses a goal programming structure to find points on the efficient frontier which are realistically achievable by DMUs, but at the same time achieving a closer approach to long term organizational goals (as distinct from the local performance of individual DMUs). Consideration is given to the possibility of adjusting constraints on the DMU by investment in extended inputs or new technologies, in which case minimization of associated investment costs becomes an additional management objective.     

A comparison of simplified value function approaches for treating uncertainty in multi-criteria decision analysis

Uncertainty is present in many decisions where an action's consequences are unknown because they depend on future events. Multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT) offers an axiomatic basis for choice, but practitioners may prefer to use simpler decision models for transparency, ease of use, or other practical reasons. We identify some ‘simplified’ models currently in use and use a simulation experiment to evaluate their ability to approximate results obtained using MAUT. Our basic message is that avoiding assessment errors in the application of a simplified model is more important than the choice of a particular type of model, but that the best performance over a range of decision problems is from a model using a small number of quantiles.     

Statusgefälle und Intragruppenprozesse in Schülerarbeitsgruppen

The study investigates group status and group processes between students working in small groups in the classroom. 40 lessons of ten teachers were observed and videotaped. It can be shown that there is a different status and leadership behaviour between the members of the groups but very interesting, there is no ?free rider“ effect. Status differences are not a constant phenomenon on over different lessons and they are not important for good results at the end of group work but sensitive for the leadership practiced in group work. Between the group processes and the results there are specific relationships. Implications for managing group work are discussed.     

The inferring of preferences from indifferences in multicriteria decision analysis

Rivett [5] has proposed that an approximate preference ordering may be deduced from statements of pairwise indifferences between decision alternatives by using multi-dimensional scaling. In this paper it is demonstrated that much stronger evaluations of preference are possible by applying formal statistical inferential procedures to a simple parametric model, relating indifference to closeness on a scale defined by a linear function of attribute values. This can be used to screen out a considerable proportion of less desirable decision alternatives. The method is illustrated by application to Rivett's problem of the hypothetical Town of Brove, for which a satisfactory matching with Rivett's utilities is obtained. It is also shown that the method can provide useful preference orderings on the basis of less than 20% of all possible pairwise comparisons between alternatives.