Interrelated Tasks Research Articles

Distributed Colouring and Communication in Rings with Local Knowledge

We consider two interrelated tasks in a synchronous n-node ring: distributed constant coloring and local communication. Every node knows the labels of nodes up to a distance r from it, called the knowledge radius. In distributed constant coloring every node has to assign itself one out of a constant number of colors, so that adjacent nodes get different colors. In local communication every node has to communicate a message to both of its neighbors. We study these problems in two popular communication models: the one-way model in which each node can only either transmit to one neighbor or receive from one neighbor, in any round, and the radio model in which simultaneous receiving from two neighbors results in interference noise. We show that distributed constant coloring and local communication are tightly related and one can be used to accomplish the other. Also in most situations the optimal time is the same for both of them, and it strongly depends on knowledge radius.

Historical development and characteristics of social work in today’s China

Social work education has experienced three stages since its introduction to China in the 1920s: introduction, abolishment and reinstatement. Theoretically, there are four types of social work in China: official–educational, official–practical, voluntary–educational and voluntary–practical. In practice, all four types of social work have not necessarily been embodied in each developmental stage, and the order of their historical development is not the same as the order of their logical development; i.e. some types are lacking in some of the stages. Each type of social work has its own characteristics, which are integrated into each development stage. Today, Chinese social work faces two major interrelated tasks: the professionalisation and the institutionalisation of social work. The former refers to the development of standardisation in Chinese social work; the latter has to do with the development of the social welfare institution in general and the development of institutional welfare in particular. In general, the dramatic development in Chinese social work largely depends on the accomplishment of the two tasks.

Problem-Based Inquiry on World Water Problems in Large Undergraduate Classes

This paper reports on the design and implementation of a project-based course—World Water Problems—that was introduced within the framework of introductory undergraduate geography education. The aims of the course were twofold: (1) to cultivate in students a world geographic perspective on water problems; and (2) to conduct an original research project on the search for detailed appraisals, or ex-post evaluations, of completed water projects and programs. The project involved problem-based inquiry and learning through several interrelated tasks including: hypothesis testing, systematic electronic library and database searching, corresponding with water resources experts; and synthesizing of results. Evaluation of the project, and the course more generally, was achieved through a questionnaire administered to the students and a focused in-class discussion. Overall, the students' comments about the course project demonstrate learning in the form of greater knowledge of world geographic regions and water sectors as well as enhancement of database search skills and critical thinking.

A mechanism for validating dimensioning and tolerancing schemes in CAD systems

Dimensioning and tolerancing are inter-related tasks; the validity of the tolerance representation model is dependent on the dimension model. Validation of tolerances is necessary at input and also after any changes of the dimension scheme. This paper presents a computational model for validating the dimensioning scheme and tolerance specifications compatible with dimensioning and tolerancing practice. Validation is implemented through a dimension and tolerance graph. Constrained entities are combined into progressively expanding clusters, which can be used to represent datum reference frames (DRFs), constraint groups of geometric entities, patterns, or the entire part. Validation of all dimensioning and tolerancing relations is performed using the concept of control frames, theoretical dimensions and general rules for forming clusters. The tolerance validation method proposed here supports all tolerance classes defined in the ISO/ANSI/ASME standards, as well as DRFs and special pattern and profile entity relations.

Theory and practice in the design of physician payment incentives.

Combining the economic literature on principal-agent relationships with examples of marketplace innovations allows analysis of the evolution of methods for paying physicians. Agency theory and the economic principles of performance-based compensation are applied in the context of imperfect information, risk aversion, multiple interrelated tasks, and team production efficiencies. Fee-for-service and capitation are flawed methods of motivating physicians to achieve specific goals. Payment innovations that blend elements of fee-for-service, capitation, and case rates can preserve the advantages and attenuate the disadvantages of each. These innovations include capitation with fee-for-service carve-outs, department budgets with individual fee-for-service or "contact" capitation, and case rates for defined episodes of illness. The context within which payment incentives are embedded, includes such non-price mechanisms as screening and monitoring and such organizational relationships as employment and ownership. The analysis has implications for health services research and public policy with respect to physician payment incentives.

A New Game In Town: Competitive higher education

Research universities in the USA are complex, expensive organizations that perform multiple interrelated tasks and serve numerous constituencies. The value structure that has evolved for these universities is one that creates very high barriers to entry for new players and numerous impediments to rapid change. Consequently, real competitive pressures on universities have been minimal. However, new types of for-profit and non-profit organizations are beginning to provide competition in targeted segments of higher education. The arrival of Internet-mediated distance learning will greatly increase both market penetration by these new organizations and competition between traditional institutions of higher learning. Because this new competition targets only selected activities of the research university, it risks to destabilize their organization and structure. Ways in which this destabilization might occur are analysed and possible responses are discussed.

Evaluating and Managing Cumulative Effects: Process and Constraints.

/ Cumulative effects (CEs) result from the combined effect of multiple activities over space or time. This implies a persistence through time and often a transmittal mechanism through space. Environmental legislation often requires a broader CE assessment in addition to the more direct, project-specific impacts. Current efforts to evaluate and manage CEs are hampered by the conceptual problems of defining the key issues, specifying the appropriate spatial and temporal scales, and determining the numerous interactions and indirect effects. These problems can be greatly alleviated by following an explicit process. The process proposed in this paper includes a scoping phase, an analysis phase, and a planning and management phase, with each phase consisting of two to five discrete but interrelated tasks. Numerous approaches have been developed to assess CEs, and these range from simple checklists to complex, physically based models. The utility of each approach depends on the resource of concern, relative risk to those resources, information available, and time frame for the evaluation. In nearly all cases the assessment and regulation of CEs is severely hampered by the variability in site conditions and management effects, inability to predict secondary or indirect effects, lack of data on recovery rates, difficulty of validating predictive models, and uncertainty of future events.Since any proposed activity could contribute to a wide range of potential CEs at different spatial and temporal scales, a tiered or nested approach should be followed to assess CEs. The difficulty of assessing and predicting CEs also suggests that in many cases the most efficient approach is to focus on minimizing on-site impacts. Under some circumstances adaptive management can also be a viable alternative to detailed CE assessments. Regular monitoring and feedback is critical to the successful management and regulation of CEs.

The changing global context of public health

Future health prospects depend increasingly on globalisation processes and on the impact of global environmental change. Economic globalisation--entailng deregulated trade and investment--is a mixed blessing for health. Economic growth and the dissemination of technologies have widely enhanced life expectancy. However, aspects of globalisation are jeopardising health by eroding social and environmental conditions, exacerbating the rich-poor gap, and disseminating consumerism. Global environmental changes reflect the growth of populations and the intensity of economic activity. These changes include altered composition of the atmosphere, land degradation, depletion of terrestrial aquifers and ocean fisheries, and loss of biodiversity. This weakening of life-supporting systems poses health risks. Contemporary public health must therefore encompass the interrelated tasks of reducing social and health inequalities and achieving health-sustaining environments.

Globalization in Southeast Asia

The authors attempt to accomplish four interrelated tasks in this article: (1) to develop a plausible and defensible approach to studying globalization; (2) to define Southeast Asia; (3) to delimit and historicize the globalization process in Southeast Asia; and (4) to describe and analyze the economic performance of Southeast Asia over the past 30 years or so, paying particular attention to the region before, during, and after the events of 1997.

Change in Asian Management Accounting: A Post-Crisis Perspective

This paper examines the issue of change in Asian management accounting. It has three themes. First, the paper discusses the process of change as it relates to Asian management accounting, which involves the profession undertaking three interrelated tasks: understanding the reality of its operating environment, deciding the kind of profession it wants to be, and adopting a set of value statements which will guide it in its change efforts. Next, the paper reviews the preparation gap in Asian management accounting, and suggests actions for closing the gap. Lastly, the paper examines the impact of a changing system of Asian values, capitalism, bosses and management practice on management accounting change, and suggests actions which the profession can take to speed up the change process.

Tasks, Texts and Contexts: A study of reading and metacognition in English and Irish primary classrooms

This paper is an adaptation of a paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in August 1998. It reports on a study on reading pedagogy and metacognition in six classrooms in Leeds and six classrooms in Dublin. The evidence is based on 12 teacher interviews, 43 separate lesson observations and school/class, policy/lesson documents. The paper analyses the teachers' thinking and their classroom practices with reference to inter-related themes, tasks, texts and contexts, and it draws out the implications for the development of metacognitive awareness among the 9-year-old children that these teachers teach. It attempts to explain practice with reference to teachers' conceptions of teaching, the learner and reading.

The Tragic and Faith in Pastoral Counseling

This essay uses Edward Farley's notion of the interrelation of tragic vulnerability and creation and Niebuhr's idea of faith in offering a conceptualization of the process and goals of pastoral counseling. Openness, novelty, separation, and change, which characterize creative activity, give rise to anxiety, fear, and suffering as created entities seek to achieve their ends and needs amidst the limits of life. Faith as vital concern—defined as human and transcendent relations marked by reciprocal belief, hope, trust, and fidelity—is a response that represents participation and cooperation in creative activity with its concomitant anxiety and suffering. Pastoral counseling may be understood as an activity that facilitates a response of faith as vital concern. The process of pastoral counseling involves three essential and interrelated tasks. First, the counselor invites the person to experience present and past painful disappointments, losses, and betrayals. Second, the counselor invites the client to explore the types of trust and fidelity that are distorted and diminish his or her capacities for risking intimacy, spontaneity, and freedom. The third task is learning to recognize, contain, and work through the inevitable disappointments, broken promises, frustrations, and betrayals encountered in human relationships. Thus the work of pastoral counseling involves reciprocal experiences of belief, hope, trust, and fidelity, which provide the essential and necessary ground through which persons develop a) the capacities for and experiences of spontaneity, awe, and freedom, b) the ability to handle and work through experiences and perceptions of distrust and infidelity, and c) a sense of subjective and intersubjective identity, continuity, and cohesion.

Architectural support for dynamic reconfiguration of distributed workflow applications

In a distributed environment, it is inevitable that long running applications will require support for dynamic reconfiguration because, for example, machines may fail, services may be moved or withdrawn and user requirements may change. In such an environment it is essential that the structure of running applications can be modified to reflect such changes. A complication is that such long running applications are frequently composed out of existing applications. The resulting application can be very complex in structure, containing many temporal dependencies between constituent applications. This paper describes an approach that supports the dynamic reconfiguration of a class of large-scale distributed applications that represent business processes (commonly referred to as workflows). An application composition and execution environment has been designed and implemented as a transactional workflow system that enables sets of inter-related tasks (applications) to be carried out and supervised in a dependable manner. A task model that is expressive enough to represent temporal dependencies between constituent tasks has been developed. The workflow system maintains this structure and makes it available through transactional operations for performing changes to it. Use of transactions ensures that changes can be carried out atomically with respect to running applications. The workflow system is general purpose and open: it has been designed and implemented as a set of CORBA services to run on top of a given ORB.

A clinical guide to the occupational and environmental medicine patient in a busy family practice: the two-task, four-prototype approach in the SC/EHAP initiative. Part III.

A four-prototype approach to the occupational and environmental medicine (OEM) patient in a busy primary care setting is described. A 2 x 2 table illustrates the two diagnostic, interrelated tasks during the outpatient, non-urgent visit: (a) sick? yes/no, and (b) exposed? yes/no. One may have the basic skills for task (a) but feel insecure for task (b). With OEM experience, creative use of resources (databases and consultants), and patient cooperation, a better balance between task (a) and task (b) can be achieved. The Environmental Medicine Curriculum Committee (EMCC) initiative described in Part I and Part II of this study has developed this patient-centered model to help the resident in training cope as he or she tries to deal with emerging patient concerns from the workplace and beyond. In November 1996, an expert panel of consultants representing OEM, public health, and family medicine endorsed the prototype OEM patient model for further development.

Workplace Preparedness and the Americans with Disabilities Act: Lessons from Municipal Governments' Management of HIV/AIDS

Although the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is designed to protect all disabled individuals from workplace discrimination, its mission is somewhat more difficult to accomplish in situations involving employees and job applicants who are either infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or have developed Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Concomitant social and cultural dimensions of this disease quite often make people with HIV/AIDS believe that it is perilous for them to stand up and disclose their condition, a prerequisite for protection and assistance under the act.(1) Given the prejudice that can accompany HIV/AIDS, a supervisor might weigh the risk to his or her career in assisting members of this protected group when doing so may result in opposition from key sources within the workplace hierarchy and throughout the community. Upon receipt of notification and documentation that an individual has HIV/AIDS, workplace must protect the rights of that job applicant or employee. It is the law. The need for organizational action, moreover, increases with the rising rate of HIV infection in the United States.(2) Protecting HIV-challenged individuals from workplace discrimination involves two kinds of actions on the part of organizations: meeting the job-related needs of members of this disabled group and building a workplace environment that encourages and supports the self-disclosure which the act requires. The purpose of this study is to assess the extent to which organizations, municipal governments specifically, are prepared to carry out these two highly interrelated tasks. Dimensions of the Study Three kinds of workplace responsiveness to HIV/AIDS situations are examined here: (1) HIV/AIDS-related activities and programs, (2) reasonable accommodations that are made available to employees with HIV/AIDS, and (3) reasonable accommodations that are made available for job applicants with HIV/AIDS. These are the dependent variables in this study. I also look at three sets of factors, independent variables, which can play substantial roles in determining the nature and extent of organizational responsiveness. The first factor focuses on personal characteristics of chief administrative officers (CAOs). We sometimes forget that consist of people and that people determine the organizational culture. While much of workplace cultures are historically based, it remains true that leaders influence the development and expression of culture in their organizations (Trice and Beyer, 1993; 255). They can play a significant part in the processes of sustaining or modifying existing cultures, and they can use their positions to transform the workplace environment into something totally different. Within the work setting, therefore, CAOs have the power to initiate changes that can lead to differences in organizational attitude and behavior. The role played by individuals in shaping organizational responses is also noted throughout the policy implementation literature (Pressman and Wildavsky, 1973; Van Meter and Van Horn, 1975; Yinger, 1990). Within the framework of American federalism, the best laid plans of Washington can either be accomplished or thwarted by actions and nonactions, formal and informal behavior, of people in Boston or Bakersfield. This is especially true in the case of antidiscrimination policies (Bullock and Lamb, 1984), such as those involving school desegregation (Rodgers and Bullock, 1976) or protected group integration into the work force (Saltzstein, 1986). Unfortunately, it is with these kinds of policies that interpretations with controversial, threatening, or even zero-sum consequences appear much more readily available. CAOs play a role in interpreting potential policy consequences for the workplace. The second factor focuses on two dimensions of the organization's environment: background demographics and local politics. …

Professional Role Identity and Variations in the Descriptive Profile and Organizational Attitudes of National Council on Family Relations Members

In Spring 1991, the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) conducted a membership survey. Based on these data and framed through a symbolic interaction perspective, this article explores variations in the demographic profile and organizational attitudes of three professional role identity groups that are specified in the NCFR mission statement: educators, researchers, and practitioners. The results demonstrate wide variation in the profile and attitudes of these three groups. In the context of an increasingly competitive marketplace of professional associations and high tumover rates among members in NCFR, it is concluded that professional role diversity involves both opportunities and challenges for NCFR, and represents a possible integrative and unifying theme for the organization. Professional associations, like the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR), are formed by individuals to accomplish certain educational, training, and professional objectives best met by collective action. The ultimate success of any voluntary group or organization depends upon achieving several interrelated tasks (Schein, 1985). First, it must develop a sense of mission that is shared by its members. Second, it must derive a set of objectives that are logically derived from this mission, and develop a working consensus among members about these objectives and their importance. Third, it must develop agreement among its members about the mechanisms and strategies for achieving its objectives, and devise procedures for monitoring and evaluating the success of the organization in achieving them. Fourth, it must maintain a high level of system integration and member morale to fulfill its mission, to achieve its objectives, and to sustain itself over time.

Improving justice and mental health systems interactions: In search of a new paradigm.

Over the last three decades, theorists and practitioners in the field of mental health law have adhered to adoctrinal analysis paradigm characterized by an emphasis on legal doctrine, rational analysis of self-evident, albeit abstract legal principles, and law reform. Acknowledging that the paradigm has been highly successful in facilitating major reform of mental health law, the thesis of this article is that its value for understanding and improving justice and mental health systems interactions is largely exhausted. It urges a “paradigm shift” to an approach that emphasizes the interrelated steps, tasks, and processes in the interactions of the justice and mental healthsystems. It suggests several directions where such a shift might lead: (a) inquiry focused on such organizational components of justice and mental health interactions as court clinics; (b) the development of a meaningful statistical portrait of the number and composition of cases that impact both the justice and mental health systems; (c) a better understanding of the missions, goals, objectives, and administrative structures of the components in the justice and mental health systems interactions; (d) a greater emphasis on the work of trial courts, as opposed to appeals courts; and (e) the development of a new information architecture for the field of mental health law.

Localized Identification of Constructed Facilities

A general constructed facility identification methodology that permits synthesis of localized flexibility coefficients is presented. An application of it to a region of an in-situ concrete bridge is also described. Rigorous analytical investigation and modeling is undertaken first; dynamic testing using low stress level and easily induced impact excitation are executed next. Modal parameters except for damping ratios are identified, then the mass matrix is estimated, and then the flexibility matrix is derived. Model parameters are altered rationally; and a very good match between experimental and model flexibilities is attained. This is accomplished despite the existence of several closely spaced modes and the use of a simple identification algorithm. A static test is conducted to validate the dynamic test–based identification. A very strong agreement is shown between static and dynamic test results. Analytical modeling, field testing, and data reduction are found to be highly interrelated tasks. Remarks on needed further research in each of these areas is presented.

Combinatorial Scheduling

Small projects like putting up a swing set and big projects like building a house all consist of interrelated tasks. Some of these tasks must be done in sequence, but often several tasks can be going on at once.

American Conceptions of Infant Development from 1955 to 1984: What the Experts Are Telling Parents

The efforts of the child development movement to understand development and the factors influencing it have been the basis of 2 interrelated tasks: the scientific study of children, and the dissemination of this knowledge to parents. Content analysis is used to assess the extent to which psychological theories and research about infants have been communicated to parents from 1955 to 1984 in 2 popular publications, the Infant Care manual and Parents magazine. Results indicated that there is not a singular relation between what experts know and what is communicated to parents. Information reflecting scientific advances about the biological components of infant development (perception, cognition, and temperament) have been most accurately communicated to parents, whereas discussions of the mother-infant relationship, child care, feeding, and fathers appeared to be related to the broader cultural context and demographic changes over the past thirty years. This study reveals an interaction between science and culture in our theories of infant development and child rearing.