Big Team Research Articles

Leaps in Innovation: The Effect of Discontinuous Progress in Algorithmic Tournaments

This paper explores whether innovation breakthroughs stimulate or impede future progress in individual innovation. On the one hand, one could argue that substantial improvements to the status quo might inspire advances through competition. On the other hand, one could claim such improvements might have the opposite effect, stifling motivation or creativity in rivals. Using a unique data set of predictive modeling contests from Kaggle we analyze 25,898 distinct attempts at innovation. We address two related questions to frame our central theme: (1) What effect do discontinuous leaps (as opposed to incremental steps) in innovation contests have on future progress? (2) What predicts such discontinuous leaps in innovation contests? The answers to these questions are as follows. Behavior after discontinuous leaps differs from behavior after continuous steps in innovation tournaments. We find that leaps result in increased rates of entry submission early in contests and improved scores going forward. For the second question, the characteristics that predict leaps turn out to be somewhat different than those that predict steps. Leaps are more likely with lower prior scores, while incremental steps are more likely with bigger teams and bigger prizes. This paper contributes new understanding to the literature on innovation tournaments and offers managers guidance about how to foster leaps in innovation.

‘The Million Plan’: Zionism, Political Theology and Scientific Utopianism

This article analyses Israel's first prime minister's plan for a Jewish fast mass immigration to Palestine during World War II. The ‘Million Plan’, as it was named later, envisioned an imaginary transfer of a million Jews to Palestine in a year and a half. It was formulated with the help of a big team of experts, professionals and scientists in what is known as the Planning Committee. We will attempt to analyze the Million Plan from several interconnected perspectives: First, we will read the event as marking the beginning of the establishment of a new socio-political order which Zionist historiography calls mamlakhtiyut (statism or etatism), usually linked to the establishment of Israel a few years later. Second, we will explain the event as a new stage in the relationship between the political and professional-scientific establishments in the Zionist movement. Third, we see the Million Plan as marking a new phase in the development of David Ben-Gurion's political theology and representing a further fusion of his political and theological visions. We suggest viewing the Million Plan as a pivotal event in ‘imagining’ the Jewish state and in secularizing the theological concept of messianism, as a ‘site of fusion’ in which the political and the theological were fused through the introduction of modern science and technology.

An Agile Method for Multiagent Software Engineering

The benefit of using software development methods should be a gain in regularity and clarity in software projects. Classical approaches are designed for medium to big team size with a distinctly separated and static role description combined with a top down development process. Agile methods mainly focus on small teams with low budget project size, and a fixed deadline with a bottom up development process. In this paper we present a combined approach for projects with multiple small teams growing together to a medium size project with a hard deadline and low budget – called Agile Methodology for Intelligent Agents Componentware (aMIAC). The approach will be introduced and applied within a case study.

Analysis of community health service team in service mode

A total of 526 team members from 28 community health service (CHS) centers in 5 pilot cities were surveyed by a questionnaire. All CHS centers developed team service. And 275 service teams were established and the coverage rate of area resident committee was 100%. The teaming modes were mainly divided into four kinds: medical-nursing-prevention classic combination, big team professional expansion, small team medical combination and non-health technology extensive participation. The team services showed multiple advantages of professionism, energy and time complementing. We should strengthen team construction, improve perfect team service mode and policy support and create a good environment for CHS development. Key words: Community health services; Team work; Model

Football on TV: an empirical analysis on the italian "couch" potato attitudes

This paper investigates the relationship between Football and TV audience looking for empirical evidences from Italian Serie A . The analysis traces previous econometric study, based on season 2008/09, focusing on season 2009/10. Data on 380 matches played in the Italian top professional football league are collected in order to select variables suitable of influencing the share of TV audience on satellite television. We try to estimate the «Football on TV» demand by an OLS regression model introducing a set of independent variables about the match quality, the TV programming placement, the market size of teams and their rank. In addition, our attention concentrates on the relationship between the closeness of the game and the television audience, where uncertainty of outcome is modelled using information from the betting market. It emerges that many of the theoretical expected relationships are confirmed by the econometric analysis, even though some peculiarities emerge with respect to the uncertainty of outcome issue. In particular, closer contexts are important in determining the interest of sporting events, also from the Italian TV audience perspective, but they are not crucial. If the set of explanatory variables includes both the uncertainty of outcome and teams probabilities of winning, a negative relationship between the closeness of the match and TV audience emerges. This result suggests two possible explanations. First, the TV spectators behave just like stadium fans, and they are mainly interested in their own team victory. Second, the negative relationship may be attributed to the «David versus Goliath» hypothesis since neutral positioned fans watch matches on TV in the hope that little teams defeat top ranked teams. Finally, our empirical analysis confirms the decisive role of Inter , Juventus and Milan in determining the size of couch potato audience, supporting the idea of big teams' management that the competitive balance has not a great commercial appeal, and that the collective bargaining of TV rights must not be justified on this ground.

Seven challenges for neuroscience

Although twenty-first century neuroscience is a major scientific enterprise, advances in basic research have not yet translated into benefits for society. In this paper, I outline seven fundamental challenges that need to be overcome. First, neuroscience has to become "big science" - we need big teams with the resources and competences to tackle the big problems. Second, we need to create interlinked sets of data providing a complete picture of single areas of the brain at their different levels of organization with "rungs" linking the descriptions for humans and other species. Such "data ladders" will help us to meet the third challenge - the development of efficient predictive tools, enabling us to drastically increase the information we can extract from expensive experiments. The fourth challenge goes one step further: we have to develop novel hardware and software sufficiently powerful to simulate the brain. In the future, supercomputer-based brain simulation will enable us to make in silico manipulations and recordings, which are currently completely impossible in the lab. The fifth and sixth challenges are translational. On the one hand we need to develop new ways of classifying and simulating brain disease, leading to better diagnosis and more effective drug discovery. On the other, we have to exploit our knowledge to build new brain-inspired technologies, with potentially huge benefits for industry and for society. This leads to the seventh challenge. Neuroscience can indeed deliver huge benefits but we have to be aware of widespread social concern about our work. We need to recognize the fears that exist, lay them to rest, and actively build public support for neuroscience research. We have to set goals for ourselves that the public can recognize and share. And then we have to deliver on our promises. Only in this way, will we receive the support and funding we need.

Analysis of the NCAA Men’s Final Four TV audience

This is the first paper to investigate factors that affect the size of the TV audience for the NCAA Men’s Final Four. The model is based on Nielsen data for 54 markets for 10 years. One of the most interesting results is that college basketball teams have a measurable effect in their local markets, but even the biggest name programs do not have a national effect. However, the little known teams that succeed in the tournament, known as Cinderellas, have a national effect likely due to the media attention and success on the court. Broadcasters and advertisers are interested in maximizing the TV audience, and the model allows prediction to compare games between big market teams, big name teams, David vs. Goliath games, and a Championship game between two Cinderella teams.

Your Teams Aren't Good Enough

Welcome to Reality Check. In this column, I'll paint provocative pictures for innovation managers based on snippets from science, history, demographics, and respected business observers. As an experimental scientist, I promise to be objective and cite my sources. As a former senior manager in a Fortune 100 corporation, I'll strive to make this column worth your attention. As a lifelong rebel against intellectual laziness and unexamined premises, I'll try to make you think. If you sometimes find the conclusions unsettling, that will be because the evidence is convincing and the arrow's found its mark. Many thanks to Jim Euchner and MaryAnne Gobble for the opportunity! Your Teams Aren't Good Enough It's a pretty bald assertion. But what we know about people and knowledge, communication and teamwork, and the speed of change makes it certain: It's almost impossible that you have the team you need today, especially if you're building teams the old-fashioned way, by selecting people to work on a project from available employees. People and Knowledge Herbert Simon, computer scientist and Nobel Laureate in economics, did a study of chess grandmasters, from which he concluded that an expert's memory can hold about 50,000 chunks--action-oriented facts or patterns (Simon 1996, 89-93). He also concluded that it takes about a decade of hard practice to attain such knowledge, the 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell (2008) concludes separate the best from the mediocre. If anything, it's taking longer to become an expert as the ever-growing mountain of world knowledge is stretching the time it takes to develop creative expertise (Jones 2009). Now consider a big, important business project, and try to estimate how many little facts might matter along the way. In my first career, pharmaceutical drug discovery, a project might easily require many thousands of nuggets: facts about historic approaches, biochemistry, tissue biology, physical properties, synthetic chemistry, patents, toxicity, disease, economics, regulations, and on and on. I suspect it's no different if you're designing and selling aircraft, automobiles, smart-phones, or financial systems. It may be becoming more true as software becomes the differentiator in so many products, because software systems may be the most complex things that humans have ever created (Brooks 1995). Conclusion: Developing new, market-creating or market-leading products takes world-class talent, built on a mass of detail and experience that takes an individual many years to acquire. Communication and Teamwork To accommodate the growing complexity of projects and the limits of any one person's time and knowledge, work is increasingly done in teams, and the teams are getting larger (Jones 2009, figure 1C). But teamwork has intrinsic limits: Brooks's Law (The way to slow down a project is to put more people on it) captures the tradeoff between the benefit of distributing the work to more people and the exponential growth in the inefficiency of interpersonal communication as teams expand (Brooks 1995). To work together, people must share not only facts but trust; unfortunately, our circles of trust are modest in size and slowly built (Dunbar 1997). The scaling math is not good: for a team of n people, the number of connections for facts and trust grows as n-squared, which is why the rule of thumb for effective team size is a number between four and ten. Bigger teams will have idle participants and bog down in slow decision-making. Fighting that tendency exacts a cost in hands-on management. But if a team should be small, can we count on it to pick up the knowledge it needs from the rest of the company without having to formalize those connections? A large study at Cornell suggests not; an analysis of 14 million e-mails among 43,000 students showed that people at three or more degrees of separation (Alice knows Bob, who knows Christine, who knows David) will essentially never communicate (daily probability about 0. …

Is parity good? Externalities in professional sports

In professional sports there are externalities. If one team acquires too much talent then that may impact the quality of the competition negatively. This means that the league can improve social welfare by distorting the competitive equilibrium allocation. This idea has been used to explain that there should be parity among teams to improve social welfare. We develop a theoretical model based on Biner's (2009) empirical results to capture the effect of this externality on the revenue levels and wages when local fans care about winning only. Social Planner's Problem for stadium revenues implies that it is possible to increase the total revenue made in the league compared to competitive equilibrium levels by increasing big market teams' talent level, therefore less parity. In other words due to externalities competitive market allocation is too equal compared to SPP allocation. We show when local audience is mainly interested in seeing their local team dominating the visiting team and national audience only interested in watching a close game on TV, the only way in the model for it ever to be efficient to enforce parity is if we introduce a national TV market into the analysis. For the national TV market, parity is going to lead to a wider TV audience. The greater the weight on this revenue stream, the more likely it is a parity policy can increase league revenues.

Academician Basov, high-power lasers, and the antimissile defense problem

A review of the extensive program of the pioneering research and development of high-power lasers and laser radar undertaken in the USSR during the years 1964 to 1978 under the scientific supervision of N.G. Basov is presented. In the course of this program, many high-energy lasers with unique properties were created, new big research and design teams were formed, and the laser production and testing facilities were extended and developed. The program was fulfilled at many leading research institutions and design bureaus of the USSR Academy of Sciences and defense industry.

Improving Quality Control In Medical Equipment Inventory

Improving Quality Control In Medical Equipment Inventory

Violence, Development, and the Making of the World Development Report 2011 : An Interview with Bruce Jones

Violence, Development, and the Making of the World Development Report 2011: An Interview with Bruce Jones Nils Gilman and Bruce Jones Editor’s note: Bruce Jones of New York University was the lead author of the latest World Bank World Development Report. On July 27, 2011, Humanity coeditor Nils Gilman interviewed Jones about it. Jones spoke in his capacity as a scholar: the perspectives he voices are his own, not those of the Bank. Nils Gilman: As background, please tell us what “World Development Reports” are, and how in general they get put together. Bruce Jones: “World Development Reports” (WDRs) are the flagship research products of the World Bank. Every year the Bank chooses a topic on which to concentrate research focus—a topic on which it feels there has been enough policy or research development that it warrants a fresh look. Then usually a pretty big team is put in place, but led by one or two senior scholars who pull together the material. Most WDRs are longer than this one, and most of them have a series of separate chapters written individually by different people. For this one, to make it more accessible for policymakers, we tried to keep it a little shorter, and we had an integrated drafting: we didn’t pass out chapters, but did the drafting ourselves. NG: Your official role for the project was “Senior External Advisor.” What did that entail? BJ: I was integrally involved from the beginning with the two co-leads, Sarah Cliffe and Nigel Roberts, in designing the architecture of the research. Then I was one of the three principal drafters of text, along with Sarah and Nigel. There was a large cast of characters who contributed ideas in a number of different ways. Finally, I had the additional role of brokering the interrelationship between the Bank team, on the one hand, and the United Nations, on the other, because a lot of the topics were ones on which we had to bring in U.S. expertise or bore on UN issues, so we had to spend a lot of time doing consultations and engagements with the UN, and I helped organize a lot of that. NG: How did the Bank decide to take on the topic of conflict and violence as a developmental issue? [End Page 103] BJ: There were two things. One, it’s been a topic that [World Bank President Robert] Zoellick himself paid quite a lot of attention to when he got to the Bank in 2007. (In 2008, he gave a major speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, setting out some of the key themes.)1 Then there was a competition of ideas inside the Bank about what the topic should be, and this won out. There are usually three or four proposals, and this one won Zoellick’s attention. Violence and Development NG: Let’s begin with some of the substantive findings. What kind of violence is the Bank concerned with in this Report? As you were designing the Report, did you consider the variety of different ways in which different societies define violence, and variations in the legitimacy of different sorts of violence? BJ: We basically excluded both interpersonal violence at a family level and criminal violence of a disorganized type. (We weren’t interested in robberies, or murders of a limited type.) For our purposes, the violence had to be, first of all, organized and, second of all, in some sense, a challenge to the state. That was our threshold: is the violence organized in such a way that it constitutes a challenge to the state, such that it interrupts the developmental pattern of the state? Whether it is organized into a rebel group fighting the government, an organized criminal gang that is challenging the rule of law, a terrorist organization—for us those were more minor questions than the first one: “Is it organized, and of a scale where it constitutes a challenge to the legitimacy of the state?” What we found when we actually started to do the work—and this is very much an initial finding, and it needs a lot more work (but my hunch is...

Are Surveys of Experts Unbiased? Evidence from College Football Rankings

Policy makers are frequently interested in soliciting unbiased information regarding alternative policies, and expert surveys can be influential. Since ranking policies is an often subjective process, there is always the concern of bias, both intentional and not. Expert bias is difficult to discern in the policy world, but surveys of expert opinion are compiled and for accuracy weekly in college football, allowing for hypothesis testing. While previous research has used college football rankings to determine the ability of surveys to incorporate relevant information, this paper examines the Associated Press and American Football Coaches' Association rankings for evidence of systematic bias. Specifically, more than 1,300 games from the 2003 to 2008 regular seasons are tested for factors that are systematically correlated with upsets. Both polls predict the winner nearly 80 percent of the time, and though there is evidence of systematic conference bias, correcting the rankings would only improve the accuracy of the polls by about 1 percent. There is no evidence of a bias favoring big market teams, nor teams that have strong journalism programs or are from the East Coast.

Developing a content maintenance and governance strategy

The Missing Piece of Content Management Information and content governance is frequently a missing piece of a content management plan. Think of building the new content management system (CMS) as building a new house.You design the layout of the house and requirements based on the needs of your family. Then you move into the house. In preparation for the move, you put all of your possessions in boxes and mark those boxes to indicate where they will be going in the new home. If you are moving into a larger home, you’ll likely take items that were in a single room and put them into multiple rooms.

Big emitters team up

Big emitters team up

Equal Strength Teams or Dominant Teams: Policy Analysis of NFL

In North America, professional sports leagues operate mostly as cartels. They employ certain policies such as revenue sharing, salary caps to ensure that teams get high revenues and players get high wages. There are two major hypotheses regarding the talent distribution among the teams that would maximize the total revenues, dominant teams rule and equal strength team rule. This paper examines the revenue structure of National Football League and proposes policy recommendations regarding talent distribution among the teams. By using a unique, rich data set on game day stadium attendance and TV ratings I am able to measure the total demand as a function of involved teams’ talent levels. Reduced form regression results indicates that TV viewers are more interested in close games, on the other hand stadium attendees are more interested in home teams’ dominance. In order to identify the true effects of possible policy experiments, I estimate the parameters of the demand for TV as functions of team talent , fixed team and market variables by using partial linear model described as in Yatchew (1998) which uses non-parametric and difference-based estimators. I then estimate the demand for stadium attendance using random coefficients model by using normative priors for the 32 cities that hosts the teams. Estimated demand for TV ratings and stadium attendance corroborates the findings of reduced form regressions, stadium demand and TV demand working against each other. We therefore propose a “somewhat” equal strength team policy where big market teams has a slight advantage over the others. Total revenues of the league is maximized under such a policy.

Scientific Community ‐ contact networking, research collaboration on a global scale

Abstract Purpose In the era of globalisation and growing competitiveness research projects are conducted by big teams of scientists located in distant geographical locations. Management of collaboration of such diffused team is a big challenge even for experienced leaders, which requires a lot of efforts and careful logistics. Methods Virtual Research Groups is an internet‐based platform for management and conduction of multi‐center research projects. The platform consists of four modules: research module, information module, communication module and administration module. The system allows complete supervision and control of investigators and approval of entered protocols if needed. Simple protocols can be set up easily by investigators but more complicated ones are custom‐made and contain validation algorhytms. Statistical tools are available and are set up individually for the project according to the investigators requirements. Information module provides up‐to‐date literature on the subject of investigation along with information on available grants and other financial support, conferences and even suggestion on scientists whos profiles match the subject of investigation, who might be invited to join the group if expansion is desirable. Financial and scientific settlement of the project is one of the new features of the Virtual Research Groups. Conclusion The platform can be equally used for spontaneous creation of research teams as well as for management of structured research consortia or multi‐center clinical research Commercial interest

Performance of soccer on the stock market: Evidence from Turkey

This paper assesses the effect of soccer success on stock market returns for three major Turkish teams (Beşiktaş, Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray) after certain characteristics of the stock market are controlled for. The empirical evidence presented here suggests that Beşiktaş's win against foreign rivals in the Winner's Cup increases stock market returns. The same effect is not present for the other two big teams (Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray). The day of the week effect on the stock market and the relationship between risk and return are also presented.

Why Writing Your Own Search Engine Is Hard

There must be 4,000 programmers typing away in their basements trying to build the next “world’s most scalable” search engine. It has been done only a few times. It has never been done by a big group; always one to four people did the core work, and the big team came on to build the elaborations and the production infrastructure. Why is it so hard? We are going to delve a bit into the various issues to consider when writing a search engine. This article is aimed at those individuals or small groups that are considering this endeavor for their Web site or intranet. It is fun, but a word of caution: not only is it difficult, but you need two commodities in short supply: time and patience.

Professional Sports and Sunbelt Cities

Economists use many indicators to judge the size and importance of a city and its surrounding suburbs, but one of the easiest and most fun to work with is the presence or absence of big league sports teams. Until the end of World War II, American League (AL) and National League (NL) baseball, the National Football League (NFL), and the National Basketball Association (NBA) were all confined to the Northeast and Midwest, roughly the area bounded by Washington, D.C., Boston, Minneapolis, and Kansas City. The National Football League was the first to break the pattern with the Los Angeles Rams in 1946. In a time when teams traveled by train, only football, with several days between games, could afford the time for cross-country trips. The situation changed dramatically in 1958 when two of New York City's three major league baseball teams moved to California—the Giants to San Francisco and the Dodgers to Los Angeles.