MANAGEMENT SUPPORT SYSTEM AT PROMUS Using IT to Ensure Customer Satisfaction

Information-based organizations are structured to function with as small and efficient a staff as possible. To this end, executives at The Promus Companies are using IT to spread decision-making authority and responsibility for customer satisfaction and customer service throughout the organization.     

REENGINEERING METHODOLOGIES AND TOOLS A Prescription for Enhancing Success

Companies are seeking methodologies and tools to facilitate well-disciplined and organized ways of structuring, assessing, and resolving the issues that business process reengineering raises. This article reviews approaches to BPR that can better your odds of success.     

Commitment as a moderator of the goal-performance relation: A case for clearer construct definition.

A central assumption in the goal theory literature is that the degree of commitment to the assigned goal moderates the effectiveness of the goal-setting procedure. However, attempts to empirically verify commitment's moderating role have generally met with failure, calling into question either widely used measures of goal commitment, the moderating assumption itself, or both. Three studies are described that address this issue. Results indicate that the moderation assumption is valid but is only relevant to 1 of 3 closely related motivational concepts that are commonly discussed under the heading of commitment: prechoice attitudes, the subsequent choice of a personal goal, and the maintenance of that choice. It is suggested that a view of commitment that more clearly distinguishes these concepts can provide a better guide for future empirical research than can existing viewpoints. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

TQM implementation in hospitals

This paper discusses the essential elements for successful Total Quality Management (TQM) implementation in hospital, and the challenges that occur with such implementation. Guidelines for this implementation are provided to show how TQM tools can be used effectively in hospitals.     

Expectations about counseling in Yucatán, Mexico: Toward a "Mexican psychology."

Conducted a study of client expectations of psychological services in Yucatán, Mexico, under the sponsorship of a grant from the Organization of American States. The Expectations about Counseling–Brief form (EAC-B) questionnaire was translated and administered to 488 subjects across age, sex, and experience with psychological services. Subsequent analyses supported the reliability and robustness of the Spanish EAC-B, with factor structure similar to the EAC-B in English. Some relation was found among age, sex, prior counseling experience, and expectations about counseling. Implications of these data for future research and comparison with U.S. subjects are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ranking Pages by Topology and Popularity within Web Sites

We compare two link analysis ranking methods of web pages in a site. The first, called Site Rank, is an adaptation of PageRank to the granularity of a web site and the second, called Popularity Rank, is based on the frequencies of user clicks on the outlinks in a page that are captured by navigation sessions of users through the web site. We ran experiments on artificially created web sites of different sizes and on two real data sets, employing the relative entropy to compare the distributions of the two ranking methods. For the real data sets we also employ a nonparametric measure, called Spearman's footrule, which we use to compare the top-ten web pages ranked by the two methods. Our main result is that the distributions of the Popularity Rank and Site Rank are surprisingly close to each other, implying that the topology of a web site is very instrumental in guiding users through the site. Thus, in practice, the Site Rank provides a reasonable first order approximation of the aggregate behaviour of users within a web site given by the Popularity Rank.     

The need for style systems in ODA

Many advanced document systems provide a formatting mechanism called ‘style sheets’ Style sheets provide a great deal of flexibility in describing a document's format, and allow easy maintenance of different house styles for a collection of documents. In this paper, we describe the basics of general style sheet systems, argue that successful document interchange must include the exchange of style sheet information, and evaluate ODA's style mechanism against this requirement.     

Long-term working memory in the rat: Effects of hippocampally applied anisomycin.

The extent to which protein synthesis is involved in working memory was investigated with the protein synthesis inhibitor anisomycin (ANI). Male albino and Long-Evans rats were trained to perform accurately on a 12-arm radial maze when delays of 240 min were interposed between Choice 6 and Choice 7. Bilateral hippocampal cannulas were then implanted. Accuracy on Choices 7–22 was studied when ANI (80 μg/μl) or saline was injected either 30 min before Choice 1 or 5–20 min after Choice 6 in Exp I. Pretrial injection of ANI significantly impaired performance following the 240-min delay, whereas ANI injected during the delay had no such effect. In Exps II and III, the ANI-induced amnesia was replicated, and the temporal course of development of the amnesia was determined. Pretrial administration of ANI did not significantly affect retention after a 2-min delay but produced amnesia after delays of 15 min or longer. Data suggest that protein synthesis is important for the formation of temporary memories, provided the retention interval is long enough. It is suggested that working memory includes both short- and long-term components. Protein synthesis appears to be important for formation of the long-term component, but not the short-term component, of working memory. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Tile-boundary artifact reduction using odd tile size and the low-pass first convention.

It is well known that tile-boundary artifacts occur in wavelet-based lossy image coding. However, until now, their cause has not been understood well. In this paper, we show that boundary artifacts are an inescapable consequence of the usual methods used to choose tile size and the type of symmetric extension employed in a wavelet-based image decomposition system. This paper presents a novel method for reducing these tile-boundary artifacts. The method employs odd tile sizes (2N + 1 samples) rather than the conventional even tile sizes (2N samples). It is shown that, for the same bit rate, an image compressed using an odd tile length low-pass first (OTLPF) convention has significantly less boundary artifacts than an image compressed using even tile sizes. The OTLPF convention can also be incorporated into the JPEG 2000 image compression algorithm using extensions defined in Part 2 of this standard.     

Age and gender differences in cardiac reactivity and subjective emotion responses to emotional autobiographical memories.

This research reports age and gender differences in cardiac reactivity and subjective responses to the induction of autobiographical memories related to anger, fear, sadness, and happiness. Heart rate (HR) and subjective state were assessed at baseline and after the induction of each emotion in 113 individuals (61 men, 52 women; 66% European American, 34% African American) ranging in age from 15 to 88 years (M = 50.0; SD = 20.2). Cardiac reactivity was lower in older individuals; however, for anger and fear, these age effects were significantly more pronounced for the women than the men. There were no gender differences in subjective responses, however, suggesting that the lower cardiac reactivity found among older people is dependent on gender and the specific emotion assessed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)