依赖中的资源争夺:中小学生减负的困境及出路

中小学生减负问题是新中国成立以来，我国教育发展过程中力图解决但却难以根治的历史性问题。依赖中的资源争夺所引发的校际与校内关系的复杂存在，影响了减负工作的深入推进，成为中小学生减负路上的主要拦路虎。突破减负困境，可通过推动基础教育从传统静态、集中走向现代动态、均衡发展，确保义务教育阶段公办教育的公共服务能力，重新思考民办与公办教育的关系及功能定位，形成多元主体参与和共建共享的现代教育治理体系，构建低竞争、低控制、真评价的教育生态环境等举措合力助推。希望以此为我国中小学生减负工作的有效开展提供行动借鉴和理论参考。     

Flexible work planning of service agents with load balancing

This work emerged from the need to better plan the daily work of 29 travelling service agents, who provide 1090 services to 412 customers in 283 sites, on daily average. A handy and flexible tool was developed and is presented herein. A major contribution of this study is an explicit consideration of the multi-dimensional nature of the problem by the inclusion of workload balancing, which may stand in conflict to cost minimisation. Further, the geographical distribution of the demand is highly irregular. Therefore, two load measures are required and balanced. This required to fitting a proper planning scheme. The planning tool has been applied successfully by the commercial service provider. Improvements in the order of 20% and more were obtained in key performance measures. Moreover, cost reductions, service improvement and load balance were obtained simultaneously: the standard deviations of the service times and working day’s duration were reduced by 18 and 58%, respectively. This enables to reduce the number of agents with no significant harm in performance. Additional practical advantages of the proposed tool are also discussed and demonstrated, for example, the ability to cope with geographical distributions and the flexibility to respond to daily variations in demand.     

Stressors beget stressors: The effect of passive leadership on employee health through workload and work–family conflict

The current study examined passive leadership as a potential antecedent of two commonly studied workplace stressors (i.e. workload and work–family conflict), and investigated its negative effect on employee burnout and physical symptoms via these stressors. We collected two waves of data from 274 focal participants, and one wave of data from their co-workers. Results showed that both self-reported and co-worker-reported passive leadership was positively related to employee burnout and physical symptoms, as well as workload and work–family conflict. Additionally, workload and work–family conflict partially mediated the effects of passive leadership on burnout and physical symptoms, respectively. Our findings support the notion that passive leadership can create a stressful workplace and have a detrimental effect on employees’ health.     

Family Roles as Moderators of the Relationship Between Schedule Flexibility and Stress

Employer initiatives that address the spillover of work strain onto family life include flexible work schedules. This study explored the mediating role of negative work–family spillover in the relationship between schedule flexibility and employee stress and the moderating roles of gender, family workload, and single‐parent status. Data were drawn from the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce, a nationally representative sample of working adults (N = 2,769). The results indicated that schedule flexibility was associated with less employee stress and that these associations were mediated by perceptions of negative work–family spillover. This study found the moderating relationships of gender, family workload, and single parenting in the relationships between schedule flexibility and negative work–family spillover and stress. Schedule flexibility had stronger relationships in reducing negative work–family spillover and stress among women, single parents, and employees with heavier family workloads. The findings provide empirical support for intervention efforts involving schedule flexibility to reduce workplace stress among employees with family responsibilities.     

数字化核电厂界面管理任务对操纵员心理负荷及注意力影响研究

核电厂数字化人机界面管理任务给操纵员带来了影响,降低了第一类任务的绩效。文章以界面管理任务为背景,基于问卷调查,探讨界面管理任务对操纵员心理负荷、注意力影响因素的程度及因素之间的相关性。研究结果表明,界面管理任务对操纵员心理负荷影响较大的几个影响因子为“脑力需求”“任务难度”“紧张度”“疲劳程度”。其中,任务难度对脑力需求、紧张度、努力程度、疲劳程度有较大影响;疲劳程度与脑力需求、任务难度、紧张度相关;界面管理任务对注意力的消耗程度与紧张度、操作负荷、疲劳度、脑力负荷有较大影响;若操作负荷越大,操纵员心理压力越大,会更紧张,消耗的注意力资源也会越多。     

The Changing Face of Public Adoption Practice

ABSTRACT

A study analyzing the workload of California's public adoption workers revealed how much adoption practice in the public sector has changed in recent years. Using focused discussion groups, this study found that compared to practice of an earlier time, (1) children available for placement come from more problematic families and are more difficult to place; (2) some decisions traditionally with the domain of adoptions are now being made by other social workers; and (3) increased oversight by the judicial system has had several unanticipated consequences, including adoption work taking on a “paralegal” quality and judges making traditional casework decisions.     

Capacitated qualification management in semiconductor manufacturing

In semiconductor manufacturing, machines are usually qualified to process a limited number of recipes related to products. It is possible to qualify recipes on machines to better balance the workload on machines in a given toolset. However, all machines of a toolset do not have equal uptimes and may further suffer from scheduled and unscheduled downtimes. This may heavily impact an efficient recipe-to-machine qualification configuration. In this paper, we propose indicators for recipe-to-machine qualification management based on the overall toolset workload balance under capacity constraints. The models, deployed in industry, demonstrate that the toolset capacity must be considered while managing qualifications. Industrial experiments show how capacity consideration leads to an optimal qualification configuration and therefore capacity utilization.     

审判经验的迷局与研判——从“案多人少”切入

2008年以来,江苏法院开展了大规模的总结审判经验专项活动。这是在案件数量剧增的态势下法院为化解案多人少的矛盾之为,但得到的经验相当一部分并非是有效提升办案效率的＂精品＂。从短期看,审判经验总结会适得其反,加大案多人少压力;但从长期来看,对于缓解案多人少压力会有所帮助。因此,审判经验有总结的价值,但在传承和发展审判经验时,对于个人经验和集体经验应当区别对待。     

Polynomial Factorization for Servers with Semi-Markovian Workload: Performance and Numerical Aspects of a Verified Solution Technique

Abstract

We investigate polynomial factorization as a classical analysis method for servers with semi-Markov arrival and service processes. The modeling approach is directly applicable to queueing systems and servers in production lines and telecommunication networks, where the flexibility in adaptation to autocorrelated processes is essential.

Although the method offers a compact form of the solution with favourable computation time complexity enabling to consider large state spaces and system equations of high degree, numerical stability is not guaranteed for this approach. Therefore we apply interval arithmetic in order to get verified results for the workload distributions, or otherwise to indicate that the precision of the computation has to be improved. The paper gives an overview of numerical and performance aspects of factorization in comparison to alternative methods.     

A proposed methodology for the prediction of mental workload, based on engineering system parameters

In the design of engineering systems, mental workload is one of the most important factors in the allocation of cognitive tasks. Current methods of task allocation have criteria that are defined in only general terms and are thus not very useful in aiding detailed decision-making in system design. Whilst there are many quantitative criteria available to determine the physical space in human-machine interaction, system designers really require an explicit model and specific criteria for the following identification of the mental workload imposed by the system; prediction of both human and system performance; evaluation of the alternatives of system design; and the design of system components. It is argued that the available methods of workload or performance are either too domain-dependent to apply to the design of other systems, or subject-dependent and thus do not reflect the objective workload imposed by the system. The presented research adopts a new approach to cognitive task analysis in dynamic decision-making systems. Based on the characteristics derived from task analysis, a general conceptual model of the prediction of mental workload in system design is proposed. In the new model, workload is represented by a set of system parameters—task arrival rate, task complexity, task uncertainty, and performance requirements—which are considered to be the main sources of workload. In this context, workload becomes an objective demand of engineering systems, independent of any subjective factors. Whether an individual or population is overloaded depends upon their workload threshold with respect to the specified task and environment. It is hoped that this new model, after both laboratory and industrial validation, could be used by system designers to predict the workload imposed on people by systems.