CORPORATE CITIZENSHIP AND URBAN PROBLEM SOLVING: THE CHANGING CIVIC ROLE OF BUSINESS LEADERS IN AMERICAN CITIES

ABSTRACT:  Our concern in this article is corporate civic elite organizations and their role in social production and urban policy in the United States. Recent urban literature has suggested that the power and influence of CEO organizations has declined and that there has been some disengagement of corporate elites from civic efforts in many urban areas. Yet while these trends and their likely consequences are generally acknowledged, relatively little empirical research has been conducted on the nature and extent of the shifts in corporate civic leadership and on how these shifts have affected the civic agendas of central cities and metropolitan regions. In this study we obtain data from 19 large metropolitan areas in order to more systematically examine shifts in corporate civic leadership and their consequences. Our results suggest that the institutional autonomy, time, and personal connections to the central cities of many CEOs have diminished and that the civic organizations though which CEOs work appear to have experienced lowered capacity for sustained action. These trends suggest that while many CEOs and their firms will continue to commit their time and their firms' slack resources to civic enterprises, the problems they address will differ from those tackled in the past. We discuss the important implications these shifts have for the future of corporate civic engagement in urban problem solving and for the practice of urban governance.     

Process improvement versus enhanced inspection in optimized systems

This paper analyses the cost-quality implications of process improvement versus inspection enhancement for n-stage serial production processes. The analysis determines, For a given environment, the combination of process and inspection performance that minimizes the cost of each defect-Free unit produced. Insight into the process-improvement inspection-enhancement trade-off, is obtained by identifying a base-line environment and then varying key environmental parameters including: measures of production and inspection quality, functional relationships between these qualities and their costs, and penalty costs incurred by delivery of defective units to the customer. The results of the analysis are presented in the context of decisions or strategies for the immediate, short-run and long-run optimal combinations of process improvement and inspection enhancement.     

Part I-Smith form and common divisor of polynomial matrices

Polynomial matrices play an important part in linear system calculations. New computational procedures are given for calculation of the Smith normal form and the greatest common right divisor of polynomial matrices. It is shown how suitable transformation matrices can be determined for the calculation of the Smith normal form, and how a set of polynomial matrix multipliers can be calculated for the greatest common right divisor problem. Neither of these algorithms relies on explicit calculation of the greate3t common divisor of polynomials. Limited numerical experience has shown that the3e algorithms are both fast and accurate.     

Calculators are needlessly bad

In the two decades hand-held calculators have been readily available, there has been ample time to develop a usable design and to educate the consumer public into choosing quality devices. This article reviews a representative calculator that is “state of the art” and shows it has an execrable design. The design is shown to be confusing and essentially non-mathematical. Substantial evidence is presented that illustrates the inadequate documentation, bad implementation, feature interaction, and feature incoherence. These problems are shown to be typical of calculators generally. Despite the domain (arithmetic) being well defined, the design problems are profound, widespread, confusing—and needless. Worrying questions are begged: about design quality control, about consumer behaviour, and about the role of education—both at school level (training children to acquiesce to bad design) and at university level (training professionals to design unusable products). The article concludes with recommendations.“The problem of efficient and uniform notations is perhaps the most serious one facing the mathematical public.” Florian Cajori (1993)“[. . .] contrivances adapted to peculiar purposes [. . .] and what is worse than all, a profusion of notations (when we regard the whole science) which threaten, if not duly corrected, to multiply our difficulties instead of promoting our progress.” Charles Babbage, quoted in Cajori (1993).     

ULTRA-HIGH TEMPERATURE EFFECT ON B. STEAROTHERMOPHILUS DURING PUFFING OF RICE1

Destruction, damage and activation of thermophilic bacterial spores of Bacillus stearothermophilus at ultra-high heating temperatures (170°C to 210°C) were studied using a rice cake machine as a model system. Activation of spores at ultra-high temperatures was observed after 99.9% of the original spores were killed (P < 0.05). Significant difference (P < 0.01) in spore counts was found when a rich protein medium and a minimal nutritious medium were used simultaneously to recover spores after heating. This indicated that heat damage did occur and that amino acids were required to repair the damage.     

Chemical and Microbiological Analysis of Vacuum-packed, Pasteurized Flaked Imitation Crabmeat

Various procedures were used to attempt to correlate spoilage of imitation crabmeat with sensory analysis after storage at 4°C, 10°C and 22°C. Total volatile acids, total volatile bases, cadaverine, putrescine, histamine, aerobic plate count, and proteolytic count correlated well with product spoilage at 22°C. Even though 22°C is considered abusive, the only pathogenic organism isolated was Bacillus cereus. In contrast, at 4°C and 10°C, neither the chemical nor microbial indicators were adequate to assess quality of the product. Thus sensory analysis, despite its limitations, remained the only method currently available to assess product acceptability after prolonged storage at reduced temperatures.     

Sintering and Grain Growth of Alpha-Alumina

The sintering (densification) and grain growth of alumina were studied to determine the effect of the variables raw material, particle size, grinding in acid media, molding pressure, various single additives in different amounts, and firing temperature. Fine grinding promoted sintering and the growth of large grains and caused the grains to be more elongated in habit. Sintering was facilitated by additions of iron oxide, manganese oxide, copper oxide, and titanium oxide, provided the amounts of these oxides and the temperature of firing were within certain bounds. The growth of large grains was facilitated by additions of iron oxide and manganese oxide. Nineteen other additives had no effect or retarded sintering and large-grain growth. Both magnesium oxide and silica had a marked effect in inhibiting the growth of large grains. The alkali metal oxides, added singly, were especially deleterious to the production of strong alumina bodies. The maximum density and maximum strength of the fired body were attained approximately simultaneously with the onset of large-grain growth. The habit of the large grains was markedly altered by increasing amounts of each additive; the grains lost their characteristic crystalline shape and became nearly spheroidal particles. It is suggested that two grain-growth phenomena exist which are independent of each other. One is termed "small-grain growth" and is associated with densification; the other is referred to as "large-grain growth" and occurs in certain specimens, depending on the additions to the alumina, after the sintering (densification) is substantially complete.     

Quantum theory of preparation and measurement

The conventional postulate for the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics is asymmetric in preparation and measurement, making retrodiction reliant on inference by use of Bayes' theorem. Here, a more fundamental symmetric postulate is presented, from which both predictive and retrodictive probabilities emerge immediately, even where measurement devices more general than those usually considered are involved. It is shown that the new postulate is perfectly consistent with the conventional postulate.     

Analysis of Volatiles Related to Warmed over Flavor of Cooked Chevon

The development of warmed over flavor (WOF) in cooked chevon was monitored from its Tenax trapped volatiles by direct gas chromatography (GC). WOF markers, pentanal, hexanal, heptanal, 2,-3-octanedione and nonanal were identified from volatile profiles obtained with packed poly MPE coated Tenax-GC column. These volatile markers as well as the total volatiles increased over 6 days storage of cooked chevon at 4°C. Increase in hexanal was more rapid than the other WOF markers. Results suggest WOF development in cooked chevon is more rapid than reported rates for other cooked meats.