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I would like to address myself to some of the issues of nationalism which I think are implicit in the developments we have seen not only in the mineral field, but also in industrial and economic fields. We seem to be entering into what might be called a third generation of relationships between developed countries and the developing world. As has been pointed out, the day in which the major commercial interests of the metropolitan powers constituted very much a Taw unto themselves has given way to a transitional period marked by hostility and uncertainties in relations between the representatives of the industrialized and the developing nations. Such times are characterized by mutual suspicion and even now hardly a day passes that we do not read about some threatened or actual takeovers, whether it be foreign insurance companies in India or copper mines in Chile.

Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- 1 Introduction -- References -- 2 The Magic Hand of Speed: A Historical Account -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.2 Machine Speed: First Principles -- 2.2.1 Definitions -- 2.2.2 Illustrations -- 2.3 Two Ages of Machine Speed -- 2.3.1 First Age of Machine Speed -- 2.3.2 Second Age of Machine Speed -- 2.4 Machine Speed: The Invisible Factor -- 2.4.1 The Dearth of Work on Machine Speed in General -- 2.5 Speed and Speed-ups: The Economics, Engineering, and Management Literatures -- 2.5.1 Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Political Economy: Energy and Motion, or Machine Speed by Another Name -- 2.5.2 Engineering -- 2.5.3 Management -- 2.6 Summary and Conclusions -- References -- 3 The Kinetics Approach to Production -- 3.1 Introduction -- 3.2 Model -- 3.2.1 Tier I: Mechanical and Chemical Kinetics at the Sub-process and Plant Levels -- 3.2.2 Tier II: Organization and the Demand for Supervision and Tools -- 3.2.3 Aggregating Across Firms Within an Industry/Sector -- 3.2.4 Production Per Factor Indexes -- 3.3 Empirical Evidence -- 3.3.1 Tier I: Testing the Theory of Process/Sub-process Kinetics -- 3.4 The Kinetic Approach to Production: Applications and Implications -- 3.4.1 Factor Substitution: Separating Fact from Fiction -- 3.4.2 The End of Human Supervision, Not the End of Work -- 3.4.3 The Labor PFI in the Post-WWII Era -- 3.5 Summary and Conclusions -- References -- 4 Speed-ups: Logistics and Profitability -- 4.1 Introduction -- 4.2 Statistical Speed-ups: The Two Dimensions -- 4.2.1 The Logistics of Machine Speed-ups -- 4.2.2 Statistical Machine Speed: The Role of Machine Downtime -- 4.3 Case Studies -- 4.3.1 Case Study I: The Hawkeye Meat Company -- 4.3.2 Case Study II: Canada Wire and Cable Company -- 4.3.3 Case Study III: The McLean Shipping Company.

The Swedish government has decided that the Swedish National Road Administration (SNRA) can run a largescale trial involving Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA)in urban areas. This trial will be based on the experience acquired from previous smaller-scale trials

The aim of this study was to investigate visual processing speeds in children. A rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task with schematic faces as stimuli was given to ninety-nine 6–10-year-old children as well as a short form of the WISC-III. Participants were asked to determine whether a happy face stimulus was embedded in a stream of distracter stimuli. Presentation time was gradually reduced from 500 ms per stimulus to 100 ms per stimulus, in 50 ms steps. The data revealed that (i) RSVP speed increases with age, (ii) children aged 8 years and over can discriminate stimuli presented every 100 ms—the speed typically used with RSVP procedures in adult and adolescent populations, and (iii) RSVP speed is significantly correlated with digit span and object assembly. In consequence, the RSVP paradigm presented here is appropriate for use in further investigations of processes of temporal attention within this cohort.

By taking up recent research in neuroscience to explore the way brain activity is influenced by cultural conditions and stimuli such as film technique, Connolly is able to fashion a new perspective on our attempts to negotiateand thrivewithin a deeply pluralized society whose culture and economy continue to quicken.

An historical account of food history points out that the immobility of food largely determined people's diets until at least the 16th century. Even then, only spices & condiments traveled far or fast. Within another century, however, transport by sea made many food products available not just to the wealthy but also to the common people. Tea & sugar soon become a daily "necessity" to the European working class, & other products followed suit. Today, scarcely a country exists that isn't involved in international food trade & the fast food market. Today time & money, rather than means of transport, determine what people eat. In developed countries, most people claim to be too busy to cook fresh food & are wealthy enough to buy processed & precooked food. Organizations such as Slow Food have much to give us -- if we are prepared to reject the global food system. Most people would reject Slow Food & many would opt for fast food. If we want better food, however, "food of moderate speeds" is the answer -- good, fresh, healthy food produced locally, for fast access, & prepared & enjoyed at a slow enough pace to suit each of us. References. J. Stanton

A comparative approach to studying the spread of policy innovations has recently yielded new and interesting results, as well as theoretical advancements, for policy diffusion research. Specifically, punctuated equilibrium theory has been offered as an explanation for why some policies spread quickly, while others do so normally, and still others are adopted very slowly. Studies of adoption speed, however, currently rely on careful case selection or a dichotomous categorization of adoptions as fast or slow to test why policies diffuse at different speeds. Building on this foundational work, I propose a method for measuring adoption speed as a continuous concept, so that it can be modeled directly as an important outcome of interest to diffusion scholars. I then use the new measure to evaluate how adoption speed varies across time and policy domain. I further demonstrate the utility of the measure as a dependent variable by replicating past results, including the interactive effect of complexity and salience on adoption speed and positive effect of federal incentives, as well as finding preliminary evidence that policy clusters spread more rapidly than the average stand-alone policy.

Abstract
Even though 80% of a shopper's time in the store is spent moving from place to place, little is known about managing the pace of in-store traffic flow. Based on the store atmospherics literature, this article introduces interventions to optimize the pace of locomotion. A series of lab and field experiments demonstrates that changes in flooring affect customers' walking speed. The number, the nature, and the relative salience of progress markers along a walking path toward a physical location communicate goal progress and thus the motivation to reach a particular destination. Consistent with a goal gradient account, customers walk faster when fewer progress markers are placed along the walking path to the goal. The effect of the number of progress markers diminishes when the markers are unrelated to the goal and reverses when the markers are relatively more salient than the goal. This article contributes to the goal literature by showing how markers affect perceptions of goal progress (i.e., level vs. rate of progress) and provides concrete insights to speed up and slow down customers' walking speed in a retail environment.

AbstractIn the classical EPQ model with continuous and constant demand, holding and setup costs are minimized when the production rate is no larger than the demand rate. However, the situation may change when demand is lumpy. We consider a firm that produces multiple products, each having a unique lumpy demand pattern. The decision involves determining both the lot size for each product and the allocation of resources for production rate improvements among the products. We find that each product's optimal production policy will take on only one of two forms: either continuous production or lot‐for‐lot production. The problem is then formulated as a nonlinear nonsmooth knapsack problem among products determined to be candidates for resource allocation. A heuristic procedure is developed to determine allocation amounts. The procedure decomposes the problem into a mixed integer program and a nonlinear convex resource allocation problem. Numerical tests suggest that the heuristic performs very well on average compared to the optimal solution. Both the model and the heuristic procedure can be extended to allow the company to simultaneously alter both the production rates and the incoming demand lot sizes through quantity discounts. Extensions can also be made to address the case where a single investment increases the production rate of multiple products. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004.

"Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Auswirkungen des gesellschaftlichen Wandels von der Früh- über die Hoch- zur Spätmoderne auf die zeitliche Konstitution des Lebenslaufs, der Biographie und der personalen Identität. Er rekonstruiert zunächst die inhärent zeitliche Verfasstheit jeglicher Identität und versucht dann nachzuweisen, dass die 'klassische' Form stabiler moderner Identität nur vor dem Hintergrund eines generationalen Tempos des sozialen Wandels plausibel und realisierbar ist. Weil jedoch als ein Effekt der sozialen Beschleunigung die Veränderungsraten in den Beziehungsmustern und Praxisformen inzwischen eine intra-generationale Geschwindigkeit erreicht haben, sind die spätmodernen Biographie- und Identitätsmuster zu einer Anpassung gezwungen. Diese Anpassung erfolgt in Form eines Übergangs von stabilen personalen zu neuartigen situativen oder 'performativen' Identitäten. Im letzten Teil des Beitrags werden deshalb vier empirisch beobachtbare Typen solcher performativer Identität vorgestellt und diskutiert." (Autorenreferat)