Robert C. Bayer
University of Maine, Orono
Department of Animal, Veterinary and Aquatic Sciences
ABSTRACT
The lobster (Homarus americanus) fishery in the Gulf of Maine is being threatened by the taking of ovigerous lobsters with the subsequent removal of their eggs by dipping their tails in a sea water and bleach solution. Solutions equal to or greater than 20 percent (v/v) commercial bleach will cause the complete removal of the eggs in less than 2 minutes with a 50 percent solution taking only one minute. However, this process causes chemical damage to the plumose setal hairs on the pleopods which can be easily detected with a light microscope. The research reported in this paper investigates this process and provides a method of detecting the removal of the eggs so marine enforcement officers will be able to prosecute the offenders.
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ABSTRACT
This paper discusses Kenya's macroeconomic policies during the 1980s. It specifically analyzes issues of food security as it relates to market performance and policies. This is followed by projections of the effects of various policy changes and market conditions on grain production, consumption, and imports over a five year period. It appears that structural adjustment policies have consequences on both the production and consumption of food. Price incentives alone do not guarantee increased food production. Adoption of improved technologies is a critical factor. On the consumption side, governments must recognize that removal of consumer subsidies for the lowest income groups will have major implications for labor productivity and health costs.
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ABSTRACT
The paper examines GATT's Uruguay Round (UR) Agreement on Agriculture, its background and its potential impact on the US food and agricultural system. The UR was the first to include food and agricultural products. The reasons for previous exclusion (US price supports) and the inclusion in the UR (European Union policies) are presented. The Agreement includes rules for market access, export competition, and domestic subsidies as well as the related Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement. The US food and agricultural system will gain because of its comparative advantage.
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Sumali Conlon
Department of Management and Marketing
University of Mississippi
ABSTRACT
Text processing in organizations is one of the major challenges to modern information management. Recent technological advances in Text-Based Intelligent Systems (TBIS) should allow the processing of large volumes of text in a more efficient, effective, and intelligent manner, and so should significantly facilitate organizational text processing. There are five types of TBIS: automatic indexing, hypertext, intelligent information retrieval, text extraction, and text summarization and abstracting. This paper reviews current TBIS research and development efforts, and presents an application framework that examines opportunities for the use of TBIS in an organizational context. The framework consists of four major application areas: organizational communication, organizational intelligence, organizational culture, and organizational memory.
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ABSTRACT
During the Summer of 1995, a study was conducted by the author in the city of Yantai, which is located in the Shandong Province in northeastern China. The purpose of this research was to better understand the role of women and gender issues in the workplace. This article will provide a brief history and a current report on the status of women in contemporary Chinese society. A summary of findings drawn from the interviews with Chinese women English teachers will be presented.
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ABSTRACT
Electronic communication can restrict organizational communication, or open communication channels to all employees regardless of status and personality. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between social control patterns and electronic communication infrastructure use. Political, administrative, and computing infrastructure examples are used to provide initial understanding of infrastructure use. Social control models are used to provide insight into employee use of an electronic communication infrastructure. Case data from electronic communication systems is mapped to social control models to illustrate the effect of social control types on electronic communication use.
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ABSTRACT
This paper studies the observed behavior of the U.S. dollar within the theoretical scope of the exchange rate models as defined under the title of "asset market" view. The monetary approach and portfolio-balance approach models are tested over the sample period as well as shorter time episodes. The objective is to validate the exchange rate theories, and to identify episodes during which the observed dollar behaviors were consistent with those implied by the exchange rate models. The study finds many episodes during which the observed dollar behavior was matched with the implied dollar movements derived from testing the exchange rate models. In addition, the empirical evidence seems to be more supportive of the monetary approach's flexible-price exchange rate model. However, the instability of the estimated coefficients in terms of both coefficient signs and statistical significance remains a serious problem, which can be attributed to misspecification of variables and failure of models to fully capture economic events.
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ABSTRACT
This study demonstrates that a commonly used type of factor analysis, principle components analysis, contributes to the amount of error in statistical analysis. In the study, which concerns email use, factor analyses were performed using several different factor analysis methods. The results show that using factors derived via principle components analysis as dependent variables substantially increased the amount of error in regression analyses, and in several cases reduced the amount of explained variance.
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Jere S. Mendelsohn
International Polytechnic High School
ABSTRACT
Much has been written over the past decade regarding public school reform. One university, Cal Poly Pomona, has responded by supporting a unique high school on its campus. The Los Angeles County International Polytechnic High School prepares graduates to be leaders in their community, the nation, and the world. Graduates are to productively apply the knowledge they acquire to solve real problems in the world. They will be lifelong learners who adapt to a multicultural world by viewing society from a global perspective. Students will be educated through an approach emphasizing team participation in problem-solving projects based on real-world international situations. A rigorous academic curriculum will balance intellectual and experiential learning. This article seeks to show how this school is not only part of the school reform movement, but a "newform" of public education.
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ABSTRACT
The author believes that we as a civilization at the end of the 20th century are proceeding on a dangerous path toward an uncertain energy future. Institutions that we trust to make the best decisions for ourselves, are not working, and will not work in this situation. Hope lies in interdisciplinary attempts to develop and use technologies and practices that lead to a sustainable, regenerative energy future. Cal Poly's Center for Regenerative Studies is used as a case in point. A personal study of the author's current energy use indicates that capturing and converting the solar energy falling on a typical residential rooftop provides a regenerative energy resource adequate to meet all needs. [This essay is derived from remarks presented at an interdisciplinary conference on architecture and the environment put on by Cal Poly's College of Environmental Design in 1994.]
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Hany J. Farran
Civil Engineering
ABSTRACT
Given the increasing assimilation of high density population centers, particularly in earthquake prone regions, engineering emphasis is shifting towards the evaluation of existing structures' ability to withstand seismic loadings. With the advent of the computer revolution, scientists and engineers have increasingly more powerful computational tools with which to analyze structural system performance. This study centers on a three-dimensional analysis of the Vincent Thomas Suspension Bridge suspended spans.
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Chris Caenepeel
Chemical & Materials Engineering
ABSTRACT
The Engineering Interdisciplinary Clinic (EIC) has been established to provide internship opportunities for students. These students, from diverse cultural and academic backgrounds, are selected for multidisciplinary teams to work on contract engineering projects. In order to achieve client focused goals, a need exists to quickly establish committed teams with a plan of action. This has been aided by the use of intensive teambuilding. This methodology is used to quickly establish committed groups of diversely trained students, who have accepted the challenge to complete industry sponsored projects. The goals of this workshop are to: a) promote feelings of camaraderie, b) demonstrate increased quality of decision making for diverse groups, c) provide an initial plan for the yearlong EIC experience. A variety of activities, chosen to accommodate different learning styles, ranging from traditional lectures to hands on exercises, are used to achieve these goals.
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ABSTRACT
Problems may arise in the process of reading, teaching, and writing the English-language short story. Many contemporaneous stories seem wildly experimental, trendy, trivial with low reader-identification -- not models of narrative virtuosity like stories in the earlier 1900s. Teaching this literary genre becomes difficult when those and other familiar "chestnuts" fill literature anthologies. And, the creative instructor, wishing to write and publish stories and apply the experience to classroom teaching, is restricted by the tight network of influential writing workshops/schools countrywide, and their powerful editorial contacts. This article will exemplify the above issues, and suggest strategic procedures as possible remedies.
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Durmus Bozkurt
Department of Mathematics
Selçuk University, Konya, Turkey
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is to establish upper bounds for spectral norms ||Tn||2 of a class of Toeplitz matrices. Furthermore, a conjecture for a strong estimation of ||Tn||2, and two conjectures for upper bound of |det Tn| and per(Tn) will be given.
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ABSTRACT
In this article we present an application of the hyperpolar transformation to a classical fractal known as the Sierpinski gasket and explore some properties of the resulting hyperpolar image, which for brevity we call the hyperpolar Sierpinski gasket. The original Sierpinski gasket, also known as Sierpinski triangle, is a point set obtained as a limiting configuration when an infinite sequence of inverted equilateral triangles that decrease in size steadily according to a certain rule is removed from an equilateral triangle in standard position. This fractal has many interesting properties which have their analogues in the hyperpolar plane. It has been shown that a certain chaos game in which random numbers generate a sequence of point sets will, in thousands of steps, approximate the configuration of the Sierpinski gasket (Crownover, 1995). We will show that a similar chaos game in the hyperpolar plane can also produce a sequence of point sets that approximate the hyperpolar Sierpinski gasket.
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ABSTRACT
Our campus has just completed the first cycle under the pay-for-performance provision of the new collective bargaining agreement (CBA). This is not the first experience of the California State University (CSU) faculty with pay-for-performance. The Meritorious Performance and Professional Promise awards which were part of previous agreements differed in that an award did not result in a permanent increment to the faculty salary base.
Ratified in October 1995, the CBA set a December 15 deadline for recommended criteria and procedures. The purpose of this paper is to review how the process was implemented and administered on campus. Pertinent sections of the CBA and campus criteria and procedures are summarized. Campus awards and demographics are presented and related to CSU award statistics. Finally, criteria and procedures proposed for the 1996-97 cycle are presented.
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Terry Sloan
University of Western Sydney, MacArthur
Anne Ryan
University of Western Sydney, MacArthur
Hong Pak
Accounting
ABSTRACT
It is not uncommon for up to sixty ethic backgrounds to be represented by students in Australian universities like the University of Western Sydney, Macarthur. Many of these students are the first in their family to attend a university and, because English frequently is their second language, there is a heightened interest in assuring that they leave the university with the conceptual and linguistic skills necessary to successfully compete in an English-speaking labor market. This article reports on an exercise in impromptu oral presentation and role-playing interviews for job applications or promotions. Early evidence indicates that these activities provide valuable learning experiences in cultivating such abilities, in addition to nuturing other management skills also valued by prospective employers.
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ABSTRACT
Students in general, but particularly those in introductory courses and/or those from campuses with a multicultural student population, have very definite but decidely different information gathering and processing styles. In environments such as those described above there is a need for both student awareness of their cognitive preferences and use of a cognitive model by faculty in course design and teaching. Cognitive models describe four different information gathering and processing types. The purpose of this paper is to explain the importance of this cognitive model in a diverse learning environment.
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ABSTRACT
This article discusses a field study of Mhlume Sugar Company Limited. The main motivation for the study was to observe, discuss, and learn about Mhlume's activity-based costing system in order to reflect upon some fundamental issues regarding costing and pricing. This article describes: (1) the physical process of sugar refining, (2) the basic nature and principles of activity-based costing (ABC), and (3) the accounting issues raised by Mhlume's operation, including their application of activity-based costing and transfer pricing considerations in their operation.
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Cecil Jackson
University of Southern California
John Karayan
Accounting
ABSTRACT
Once upon a time, positive accounting theory -- a variant of positive economic theory -- was radical. Watts and Zimmerman, whose book Positive Accounting Theory now is the most standard fare in accounting PhD programs, had a great deal of trouble getting published in the early 1970s. Now, research in accounting must at the very least be highly quantitative, or it simply is not viewed as scholarly by the key players in academia. A parallel may be developing, however, between the progression of acceptable research methodologies in accounting with that in its elder sister, economics. Indeed, the currently pejorative term "mere" could even be dropped from the orthodox mantra of "mere descriptive research" some day in the not so distant future. This article explores the parallel.
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