Actual Effort Research Articles

Group Identity to Manipulate Social Preferences in Supply Chains with Costly E ffort

We analyze a supply chain in which a demand planner provides demand forecasts to a production planner. The production planner uses the forecasts to decide on the production quantities and needs information about the accuracy of the forecasts to determine the appropriate safety stock levels. The accuracy of the forecast depends on the effort that the demand planner invests in forecasting. The production planner cannot observe the effort and has to form a belief about the demand planner’s effort level. If the actual effort of the demand planner and the belief of the production planner are not aligned, the overall performance of the supply chain suffers. We develop a game theoretic model to show how social preferences affect the alignment between the demand planner and the production planner. Using laboratory experiments we find support for the theoretical predictions: Some demand planners invest effort, and production planners anticipate this effort. We further show that group identity can be used to increase social preferences, thereby increasing the incentives for the demand planners to invest effort, which is anticipated by the production planners and leads to increased supply chain profitability.

Correlations of perceived post-editing effort with measurements of actual effort

Human rating of predicted post-editing effort is a common activity and has been used to train confidence estimation models. However, the correlation between human ratings and actual post-editing effort is under-measured. Moreover, the impact of presenting effort indicators in a post-editing user interface on actual post-editing effort has hardly been researched. In this study, ratings of perceived post-editing effort are tested for correlations with actual temporal, technical and cognitive post-editing effort. In addition, the impact on post-editing effort of the presentation of post-editing effort indicators in the user interface is also tested. The language pair involved in this study is English-Brazilian Portuguese. Our findings, based on a small sample, suggest that there is little agreement between raters for predicted post-editing effort and that the correlations between actual post-editing effort and predicted effort are only moderate, and thus an inefficient basis for MT confidence estimation. Moreover, the presentation of post-editing effort indicators in the user interface appears not to impact on actual post-editing effort.

Does Confidence Predict Out-of-Domain Effort?

Predicting worker’s effort is important in many different areas, but is often difficult. Using a laboratory experiment, we test the hypothesis that confidence, i.e. the person-specific beliefs about her abilities, can be used as a generic proxy to predict future effort provision. We measure confidence in the domain of financial knowledge in three different ways (self-assessed knowledge, probability-based confidence, and incentive-compatible confidence) and find a positive relation with actual effort provision in an unrelated domain. Additional analysis shows that the findings are independent of a person’s traits such as gender, age, and nationality.

Studying the needed effort for identifying duplicate issues

Many recent software engineering papers have examined duplicate issue reports. Thus far, duplicate reports have been considered a hindrance to developers and a drain on their resources. As a result, prior research in this area focuses on proposing automated approaches to accurately identify duplicate reports. However, there exists no studies that attempt to quantify the actual effort that is spent on identifying duplicate issue reports. In this paper, we empirically examine the effort that is needed for manually identifying duplicate reports in four open source projects, i.e., Firefox, SeaMonkey, Bugzilla and Eclipse-Platform. Our results show that: (i) More than 50 % of the duplicate reports are identified within half a day. Most of the duplicate reports are identified without any discussion and with the involvement of very few people; (ii) A classification model built using a set of factors that are extracted from duplicate issue reports classifies duplicates according to the effort that is needed to identify them with a precision of 0.60 to 0.77, a recall of 0.23 to 0.96, and an ROC area of 0.68 to 0.80; and (iii) Factors that capture the developer awareness of the duplicate issue's peers (i.e., other duplicates of that issue) and textual similarity of a new report to prior reports are the most influential factors in our models. Our findings highlight the need for effort-aware evaluation of approaches that identify duplicate issue reports, since the identification of a considerable amount of duplicate reports (over 50 %) appear to be a relatively trivial task for developers. To better assist developers, research on identifying duplicate issue reports should put greater emphasis on assisting developers in identifying effort-consuming duplicate issues.

On Integrating the Components of Self-Control

As the science of self-control matures, the organization and integration of its key concepts becomes increasingly important. In response, we identified seven major components or “nodes” in current theories and research bearing on self-control: desire, higher order goal, desire–goal conflict, control motivation, control capacity, control effort, and enactment constraints. To unify these diverse and interdisciplinary areas of research, we formulated the interplay of these components in an integrative model of self-control. In this model, desire and an at least partly incompatible higher order goal generate desire–goal conflict, which activates control motivation. Control motivation and control capacity interactively determine potential control effort. The actual control effort invested is determined by several moderators, including desire strength, perceived skill, and competing goals. Actual control effort and desire strength compete to determine a prevailing force, which ultimately determines behavior, provided that enactment constraints do not impede it. The proposed theoretical framework is useful for highlighting several new directions for research on self-control and for classifying self-control failures and self-control interventions.

An Empirical Approach for Estimation of the Software Development Effort

The number of standards and methods has been developed for software estimation in the last many decades. These methods help practitioners and engineers to estimate the effort accurately, but they found their inability to estimate software precisely. In this paper, an empirical approach is developed to measure the software development effort. The well-known PROMISE data sets of 217 projects are collected and the several performance factors are used in this paper to validate the estimated results. This work also considers the most popular model for software effort estimating, i.e. COCOMO. And the result of the COCOMO model and proposed an empirical approach is compared with the actual effort, and concludes that the proposed approach estimates the software development effort better than COCOMO in several aspects.

Conscious Action/Zombie Action.

I argue that the neural realizers of experiences of trying (that is, experiences of directing effort towards the satisfaction of an intention) are not distinct from the neural realizers of actual trying (that is, actual effort directed towards the satisfaction of an intention). I then ask how experiences of trying might relate to the perceptual experiences one has while acting. First, I assess recent zombie action arguments regarding conscious visual experience, and I argue that contrary to what some have claimed, conscious visual experience plays a causal role for action control in some circumstances. Second, I propose a multimodal account of the experience of acting. According to this account, the experience of acting is (at the very least) a temporally extended, co‐conscious collection of agentive and perceptual experiences, functionally integrated and structured both by multimodal perceptual processing as well as by what an agent is, at the time, trying to do.

Ability to work in anaerobic condition is associated with physical performance on the six-minute walk test in older patients receiving cardiac rehabilitation.

During maximal incremental exercise, the ability to work in the anaerobic condition, expressed by the respiratory exchange ratio, is associated with physical performance. Further, peak respiratory exchange ratio is regarded as the best non-invasive measure of a patient's actual exercise effort. This study examined whether ability to work in the anaerobic condition is also associated with physical performance in submaximal constant work rate exercise. A total of 75 older patients (51 men, 24 women), mean age 71.1 years (standard deviation 6.7 years), who had recently undergone cardiac surgery, performed cardiopulmonary exercise testing in a 6-min walk test before and after rehabilitation. The distance walked, steady-state oxygen uptake, carbon dioxide output and respiratory exchange ratio increased significantly after rehabilitation (p < 0.001 for all). In multivariable models predicting the distance walked before and after rehabilitation, higher steady-state respiratory exchange ratio was independently associated with longer distance (p < 0.001 for both). In older patients receiving post-acute cardiac rehabilitation the ability to work in the anaerobic condition is associated with physical performance in submaximal constant work rate exercises. Thus the steady-state respiratory exchange ratio might be regarded as a measure of the patient's actual exercise effort. This information may prove useful in customizing exercise prescription and assessing the effects of rehabilitation.

Balance of academic responsibilities of clinical track pharmacy faculty in the United States: a survey of select American College of Clinical Pharmacy Practice and Research Network Members.

To characterize the balance of clinical and academic responsibilities of clinical track pharmacy faculty in the United States and evaluate organizational structures that promote satisfactory balance between these responsibilities. Prospective cross-sectional survey. A 22-item online survey was developed and distributed via Qualtrics software. Clinical faculty members of the American College of Clinical Pharmacy Adult Medicine, Ambulatory Care, Cardiology, Critical Care, Gastrointestinal/Liver/Nutrition, Immunology/Transplantation, Infectious Disease, and Pediatrics Practice and Research Networks (PRNs) were invited to participate via the PRN electronic mailing list. The survey comprised questions related to demographics, organizational structure, and balance of clinical and academic responsibilities. A total of 344 participants responded to some or all of the survey questions. The demographics were relatively equally balanced between faculty at state and private academic institutions, academic rank, and practice setting. Expected and actual effort allocations were similar for each of the clinical and academic responsibilities, with direct patient care and clinical teaching representing more than 50% effort allocation cumulatively. Clinical faculty at state institutions devoted a larger proportion of time to clinical service, whereas clinical faculty at private institutions devoted a greater proportion of time to didactic teaching. When asked about time constraints, 157 (69.8%) of the 225 survey participants responding to this question did not believe they had sufficient time to fulfill their nonclinical academic needs. Clinical faculty who were provided "protected time" away from clinical service had a significantly more favorable opinion of this question. Most of the clinical track pharmacy faculty indicated that they have insufficient time to fulfill their nonclinical academic responsibilities. Provision of protected time may alleviate some of these time constraints.

SMPLearner: learning to predict software maintainability

Accurate and practical software maintainability prediction enables organizations to effectively manage their maintenance resources and guide maintenance-related decision making. This paper presents SMPLearner, an automated learning-based approach to train maintainability predictors by harvesting the actual average maintenance effort computed from the code change history as well as employing a much richer set of 44 four-level hierarchical code metrics collected by static code analysis tools. We systematically evaluated SMPLearner on 150 observations partitioned from releases of eight large scale open source software systems. Our evaluation showed that SMPLearner not only outperformed the traditional 4-metric MI model but also the recent learning-based maintainability predictors constructed based on single Class-level metrics, demonstrating that single Class-level metrics were not sufficient for maintainability prediction.

Automation of Software Cost Estimation using Neural Network Technique

ABSTRACT  Software cost estimation is one of the most challenging tasks in software engineering. Over the past years the estimators have used parametric cost estimation models to establish software cost, however the challenges to accurate cost estimation keep evolving with the advancing technology. A detailed review of various cost estimation methods developed so far is presented in this paper. Planned effort and actual effort has been comparison in detail through applying on NASA projects. This paper uses Back-Propagation neural networks for software cost estimation. A model based on Neural Network has been proposed that takes KLOC of the project as input, uses COCOMO model parameters and gives effort as output. Artificial Neural Network represents a complex set of relationship between the effort and the cost drivers and is a potential tool for estimation. The proposed model automates the software cost estimation task and helps project manager to provide fast and realistic estimate for the project effort and development time that in turn gives software cost.

Do economic crises impede or advance regional economic integration in the post-Soviet space?

This article investigates the effect of economic crises on the development of post-Soviet regional integration, focusing on Russia–Kazakhstan relations and particularly the case of the Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan customs union. While the literature often argues that crises are accompanied by growing protectionism, we observe a substantially more complex relation. We find that crises as a rule result in an increase in integration rhetoric and can also result in an increase in actual economic and institutional integration. However, the actual integration effort goes up only when a crisis has followed a prolonged period of economic growth, i.e. the countries have accumulated sufficient reserves. At the same time, the existing ties must be strong, with no viable alternative available to the policy makers. Otherwise there is too strong an incentive to use protectionist measures to compensate for the decrease in budgetary revenue.

SMPTE and HPA Joining Forces—What Does it Mean? [Message from the Executive Director

At its recent meeting, the Board of Governors unanimously voted to move forward on a roadmap path to consolidate the Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) into SMPTE by May 2015. The first step in this roadmap is a nine-month agreement, whereby SMPTE will provide administrative support for the HPA back-office operations, starting 1 July 2014. At the same time, sub-groups will be working out details related to corporate structure, governance, membership, operations, and branding. Once that work is completed and both Boards are satisfied, the actual effort of consolidation will take place in early 2015.

Generating a Visual Effects Analysis for the Deepwater Horizon Endangered Species Act Biological Assessment

Although species expertise, professional judgment, and scientific literature pave the way for making determinations of effects, the vastness of the Deepwater Horizon Incident response inspired a systematic approach. The United States Coast Guard (USCG) Endangered Species Act Biological Assessment (BA) for this response began with the development of ecological models for each of the listed species potentially affected by the response. These models are tabular and connect individual strands of logic, referred to as effects pathways, which relate a potential cleanup activity to the anticipated species response. Effects pathways cannot be used alone, as they are inherently isolated and independent of any response action data. To bring the effects pathways into the context of the actual cleanup effort, a forensic geographically aware action record was generated. This record was primarily built using prescriptions for cleanup, known as Shoreline Cleanup Recommendations (STRs), Incident Command System (ICS) Forms, and Best Management Practices (BMP) Checklists. The combination of effects pathways and the action record was completed using table joining techniques. The anticipated species responses to actions were then used to create a series of heat maps. These show the accumulation of species responses along the landscape based on temporal components of activities, such as frequency and intensity. These maps provide a visual means of consuming the vast occurrences of the response to facilitate the effects analysis of the BA.

Concise adaptive neural control of uncertain nonlinear systems with periodically nonlinear time-varying parameterized disturbances

This note makes effort at the problem of robust adaptive control for uncertain nonlinear systems with periodically nonlinear time-varying parameterized disturbances with known common period. A concise adaptive neural control scheme is developed by fusion of the Backstepping method and a novel MLN (minimum learning network) technique. In the control scheme, the intermediate variables, i.e., the virtual controls, do not appear in the finally actual control effort, and only one neural network is introduced to compensate sum of the uncertainties in the whole system. Thus, the outstanding advantage of the corresponding scheme is that the control law with a concise structure is model-independent and easy to implement in the process industries due to less computational burden. Based on the Lyapunov synthesis, it is proven that with the developed concise adaptive controller, all the signals in the closed-loop system converge to a small neighborhood of zero. Finally, three comparison examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

An Early Software Effort Estimation Method Based on Use Cases and Conceptual Classes

It is an important issue in the software industry to predict how much effort will be required for a software project as early as possible. Software size is one of the commonly used attributes in effort estimation. In this paper, we propose an early software size and effort estimation method based on conceptual model of the problem domain. Our method utilizes the noteworthy domain concepts identified mainly from the use cases written in the requirements phase of the software development lifecycle. In order to develop the model and evaluate its prediction quality, the use cases written and the effort data collected for 14 industrial software development projects of a CMMI level 3 certified defense industry company have been used. Evaluation results reveal a high correlation between the number of conceptual classes identified (i.e., domain objects) during the requirements analysis, the number of classes constituting the resulting software and the actual effort spent. Moreover, we have used the use case point (UCP) method to estimate the effort needed for each project and compared the results of UCP analysis with the results obtained with our method. The comparisons have shown that, for the projects considered, our method gives a better effort estimation compared to the effort estimated by using the UCP method.

Mobilizing Candidates: Political Actors Strategically Shape the Candidate Pool with Personal Appeals

AbstractPoliticians' personal beliefs and backgrounds strongly influence politics and policy. But why do individuals with particular beliefs and backgrounds tend to run for office and become politicians? This paper argues that parties and interest groups strategically shape the candidate pool from which voters choose by mobilizing certain individuals to run for office, much like they strategically shape the electorate by mobilizing like-minded individuals to vote. Supporting this view, I first unearth decades of previously disparate evidence suggesting that candidate mobilization efforts are widespread. I then present results from an experiment embedded in an actual candidate mobilization effort that finds encouragement to run for office can meaningfully increase interest in candidacy. Implications and opportunities for further research are discussed.

Customers’ Ethical Behaviour towards Hotels

This study is an exploratory research effort to understand hotel future customers’ intentions to adopt and perform the three types of ethical tourism, namely positive, negative and discursive types. There has been scant research, so far, with regards to ethical behaviour in the tourism sector. In addition there are considerable voids with reference to the factors that are able to affect this type of behaviour. However, in Greece there is already a considerable number of hotels, which have obtained the Green Key certificate. Their managers do need and seek for the most optimum marketing channels to promote their competitive advantages.The present study aimed to offer a somewhat better understanding of future travellers’ intentions to adopt ethical consumption when travelling. Intentions of future travellers to search, plan and actually visit a green hotel was examined. The examination included also consumers’ willingness to participate in a boycotting against an unethical hotel and further spread their word against unethical hotel practices through discursive activities, such as petitions gathering, taking part in protest events etc. In addition, it was aimed to investigate the impact of attitudes and demographics on customers’ intentions to adopt and perform the above mentioned ethical behaviours.With reference to intentions to stay at a green hotel, it was found that potential travellers seem more agreeable to express their willingness to stay at a green hotel than to plan or make an actual effort to do so. The usual in consumer behaviour gap between intentions and actual behaviour was established here once more. It was also found that travellers are very much willing to participate in a hotel boycotting in cases that the hotel under boycotting has been demonstrably reported for safety and hygiene scandals, child labour, cruelty towards animals and particularly barbaric exploitation of their employees. On the con trary, consumers were not found equally willing to participate in discursive activities against unethical hotels. In fact, all they were found to do is to discuss with their friends the possibility of getting engaged in a hotel boycotting. The results also indicated t hat better educated consumers expressed higher level of intentions to stay at a green hotel, to boycott and discursively act against an unethical hotel, than their counterparts did. Women were found more likely to participate in a hotel's boycotting and consume rs of 35-44 years of age were found more likely to enhance discursive activities.Attitudes that concern green hotels seem to be able to influence moderately travellers’ intentions to stay at a green hotel. Intentions are mostly effected by those attitudes that concern consumers’ feelings that staying at a green hotel is favourable and desirable. Attitudes in overall were found to be more able to influence consumers’ willingness to stay at a green hotel than their actual plans or efforts to do so. Attitudes seem to be able, to a lesser extent, to influence consumers’ intentions to get involved in boycotting and discursive activities.These findings, if studied carefully, might very well be found useful to marketing management strategies in cas es of green hotels or hotels, which would decide to “go green” in the future. The Green Key certification should become one of criteria u sed in searching and locating hotels either through internet or the agencies. In addition, enthusiastic testimonials of past customers might very well be incorporated in the communication campaigns of the green hotels.

Treatment of phantom limb pain (PLP) based on augmented reality and gaming controlled by myoelectric pattern recognition: a case study of a chronic PLP patient

A variety of treatments have been historically used to alleviate phantom limb pain (PLP) with varying efficacy. Recently, virtual reality (VR) has been employed as a more sophisticated mirror therapy. Despite the advantages of VR over a conventional mirror, this approach has retained the use of the contralateral limb and is therefore restricted to unilateral amputees. Moreover, this strategy disregards the actual effort made by the patient to produce phantom motions. In this work, we investigate a treatment in which the virtual limb responds directly to myoelectric activity at the stump, while the illusion of a restored limb is enhanced through augmented reality (AR). Further, phantom motions are facilitated and encouraged through gaming. The proposed set of technologies was administered to a chronic PLP patient who has shown resistance to a variety of treatments (including mirror therapy) for 48 years. Individual and simultaneous phantom movements were predicted using myoelectric pattern recognition and were then used as input for VR and AR environments, as well as for a racing game. The sustained level of pain reported by the patient was gradually reduced to complete pain-free periods. The phantom posture initially reported as a strongly closed fist was gradually relaxed, interestingly resembling the neutral posture displayed by the virtual limb. The patient acquired the ability to freely move his phantom limb, and a telescopic effect was observed where the position of the phantom hand was restored to the anatomically correct distance. More importantly, the effect of the interventions was positively and noticeably perceived by the patient and his relatives. Despite the limitation of a single case study, the successful results of the proposed system in a patient for whom other medical and non-medical treatments have been ineffective justifies and motivates further investigation in a wider study.

The Behavioral Ecology of Fishing Vessels: Achieving Conservation Objectives Through Understanding the Behavior of Fishing Vessels

Colin Clark made seminal contributions in both resource economics and behavioral ecology. In the former, he showed how to link biological and economic factors in a consistent mathematical framework, virtually creating the field of mathematical bioeconomics single-handedly. In the latter, he was a major contributor of the introduction of state variable methods for modeling the behavior and life history of organisms. In this paper, we apply the methods of behavioral ecology to a problem in fisheries management and show that understanding fisher responses to quota decrements according to fishing area (so that the decrement in the quota of effort from fishing in a particular area is larger than the actual effort used there) may be as or more effective for seabird conservation than closing areas. To begin, we explain state variable methods in behavioral ecology, using insect parasitoids—Colin’s choice of after dinner talk at the meeting in his honor—making connections between behavioral ecology and resource economics. We then turn to the pelagic longline fishery off eastern Australia and show how the same kinds of methods used in behavioral ecology can provide new insights about this fishery. We provide a model of sufficient detail to compare the current management practice (closures), no management, and spatial management with effort decrements that vary over space and show that the latter management strategy is both environmentally and economically more effective than closures or no management.