PRICING CRB FUTURES CONTRACTS

This study provides a valuation model to price Commodity Research Bureau Index futures contracts, now traded at the New York Futures Exchange. An empirical analysis suggests that substantial mispricing was exhibited during the early months of trading in an unseasoned Commodity Research Bureau Index futures market.     

Physician practice style variations

This article studies the variation in physician practice style among geographic regions and across time. A physician practice profile is defined and a simple model for profile variation is developed. Ratios are calculated for the components of the profile—ambulatory visit rate, hospitalization rate and length of hospitalization—and studied in terms of adaptation to resource constraint and nonspecific style. The methods are applied to hospital use in the Census Metropolitan Areas of Canada.     

Social power-based print advertising: Theoretical and practical considerations

A laboratory experiment explored the impact of various power-based copy approaches upon readers' responses to print advertising messages. The treatments employed were derived from French and Raven's bases of social power at two levels of information content. Response measures included copy-and brand-related variables and recall. Results indicate that there are significant differences in responses owing to both the base of social power and the information level used.     

An assessment of railway capacity

In this paper, we review the main concepts and methods to perform capacity analyses, and we present an automated tool that is able to perform several capacity analyses. Capacity is extremely dependent on infrastructure, traffic, and operating parameters. Therefore, an in-depth study of the main factors that influence railway capacity is performed on several Spanish railway infrastructures. The results show how the capacity varies according to factors such as train speed, commercial stops, train heterogeneity, distance between railway signals, and timetable robustness.     

均匀圆阵的测向模糊研究

在高分辨阵列测向系统中,均匀圆阵(UCA)是一种广泛使用的阵列结构。利用均匀圆阵的阵列流形的微分几何作为分析工具,对实际中常用的几种均匀圆阵的测向模糊进行了大量的计算机仿真试验,定量地给出了这些阵列的测向模糊方向和相应的秩,揭示了均匀圆阵的测向模糊性能与其阵元数和孔径之间的关系,得出了一些有实际意义的结论。这对工程应用时均匀圆阵的选择和构造具有很强的参考价值和指导意义,可以避免系统设计的盲目性和随意性。     

Ideological maps of consumer education

The case is made for the merit of discovering and owning the ideological and paradigmatic underpinnings of consumer‐related education initiatives. After briefly profiling two camps of dominant and contending/emergent world views (ideologies and attendant paradigms), two ideological maps of consumer education are developed and applied, providing a scaffold for future deliberations about the import of world views in consumer education.     

Predicting workload requirements for scheduled health care services, with an application to radiology departments.

A model is developed for predicting workload requirements for scheduled health care services. The model is then applied to an actual planning problem for a radiology department. The probability distribution of future workload is represented by the convolution of two families of random variables such that a compound Poisson process adequately describes workload requirements. The model developed herein can be applied to a wide assortment of capacity-expansion problems that are characterized by discrete demands (e.g. number of jobs) occurring in a given period of time, where the amount of time needed to complete each job is a continuous random variable.