Gibbsian and non-Gibbsian states at Eurandom

We review some of the work on non-Gibbsian states of the last 10 years, emphasizing the developments in which Eurandom played a role.     

HOUSEHOLD FOOD CONSUMPTION: THE INFLUENCE OF HOUSEHOLD CHARACTERISTICS

This paper reports an attempt to identify the effects of various household characteristives on household food consumption. The analysis was based on National Food Survey (NFS) data for Great Britain for the calendar year 1982. Consumption (per person per week) of various food items was related to each of the main household characteristics on which information is collected in the course of the Survey-location (both country/region and type of area), income (generally of the head of the household), household composition, age of housewife, housing tenure and freezer ownership. The results indicated that all these variables are important in the explanation of households' food consumption patterns.     

Corporate Bankruptcy and Managers' Self-Serving Behavior

We investigate whether insiders of bankrupt firms hold less stock or reduce their stockholdings compared to what we observed for insiders of similar firms that do not go bankrupt. We find little evidence of such time-series and cross-sectional differences in spite of the fact that the stock value of bankrupt firms falls by more than ninety percent in the five years preceding bankruptcy. One implication of our results is that the amount of stock owned and the magnitude of the trades undertaken by corporate insiders of both bankrupt and nonbankrupt firms appear to provide no information about firm value.     

Stress and consumer behavior

Although stress research has received increased attention in the behavioral and social sciences, it has been virtually ignored by marketing researchers. This paper attempts to advance the stress perspective as a useful framework in consumer research. First, the author presents theoretical and conceptual foundations of stress research. Second, the author develops a general conceptual model of the causes and consequences of stress on the basis of theory and research. The model serves as a blueprint for presenting theory and research on stress, organizing and interpreting findings of consumer studies in the context of stress theory, and developing propositions for needed research. Finally, the author provides a research agenda to guide future studies in this area.     

3 Rethinking Global Justice from the Perspective of All Living Nature and What Difference it Makes

A bstract .   I begin this chapter with an account of what is deserved in human ethics, an ethics that assumes without argument that only humans, or rational agents, count morally. I then take up the question of whether nonhuman living beings are also deserving, and I answer it in the affirmative. Having established that all individual living beings, as well as ecosystems, are deserving, I go on to establish what it is that they deserve and then compare the requirements of global justice when only humans are taken into account with the requirements of global justice when all living beings are taken into account. I argue that the more adequate global justice that takes into account all living beings imposes some additional obligations on us that are absent from a less defensible human-centered global justice, but not as many as one might initially think.     

Performance of French intensive care units: A directional distance function approach at the patient level

By using a novel adaptation of the free-disposable hull analysis of productivity, we assess the medical and technical efficiency of patient care in 25 Parisian intensive care units (ICUs) during 2000. The robust free disposable hull (RFDH) as defined by [Cazals et al., 2002. Nonparametric frontier estimation: a robust approach. Journal of Econometrics 106, 1–25] reduces the impact outliers may have on findings by employing Monte-Carlo techniques and repeated sample selection. Among our key findings, there was no overall significant correlation between medical and technical efficiencies for all the ICUs, therefore performing well in one does not guarantee good performance in the other. We also found that over 80% of inefficiency is concentrated in less than 20% of the sampled patients.     

Can You Hear Me Now? Communication in Virtual Product Development Teams*

Globalization and technological advances are driving organizations to extend the boundaries of new product development (NPD) teams from traditional colocated settings to dispersed or virtual settings. Virtual NPD teams have a wide array of information and communication technologies (ICTs) at their disposal. ICTs allow team members to communicate and collaborate as they cope with the opportunities and challenges of cross‐boundary work. The purpose of this paper is to explore ICT use by members of virtual NPD teams. This study presents an exploratory test and integration of two competing perspectives of media use in virtual teams: media capacity theories and social dynamic media theories. Specifically, this paper examines the role of task type, organizational context, and ICT type as critical contingency variables affecting ICT use. It also examines how different patterns of ICT use relate to individual perceptions of team performance. The findings from this study of 184 members of virtual NPD teams in three global firms suggest that communication via ICTs in virtual NPD teams is contingent on a range of factors.     

Problem based learning: application to technology education in three countries

An increasing variety of professional educational and training disciplines are now problem based (eg, medicine, nursing, engineering, community health), and they may have a corresponding variety of educational objectives. However, they all have in common the use of problems in the instructional sequence. The problems may be as diverse as a mechanical predicament, an unexplained phenomena, or patient symptoms. Technology education in secondary schools is undergoing a period of significant change in many countries. It is therefore imperative that technology teacher education adopt not only the technologies that have been identified as being important, but also incorporate appropriate methodologies for the instruction of these technologies. PBL offers a number of relevant features to technology education and it is because of these that the project outlined in this paper has been developed.