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This article presents a position paper on personnel evaluation. Because formalized, systematic evaluation is everywhere a part of college and university life, the Association of Departments and Administrators in Speech Communication feels it may be useful to identify measures of productivity suitable for speech communication faculty members and administrators. A systematic, periodic evaluation should be used in determining salary increases, tenure, promotion and termination. Such evaluation should serve primarily to improve the quality of an individual's teaching, research and service. The system of evaluation should be clearly stated to a prospective faculty member at the time of hiring, and reviewed periodically.

The purpose of this paper is to make a detailed comparison of three macroeconometric models of the U.S. economy with regard to their predictive ability and policy multiplier properties. Three models are the St. Louis Model, the Wharton Model and the M.P.S. Model. These models are constructed with different emphasis on the treatment of the monetary phenomena, depending upon the philosophy of the model builder. They may respectively be called a monetarist model, a Keynesian-type income-expenditure model, and a structural model which emphasizes the monetary structure for the stabilization policy analysis. The structure of each model is not discussed in this paper but only a brief sketch of their special features is given in the next section. The predictive performance and the policy multiplier analysis are discussed in the 3rd and 4th sections, followed by some concluding remarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper starts with a short survey of the literature dealing with the problem of evaluating the performance of a given news medium or news channel as to the transmission of foreign news. Then it goes on to discuss various possibilities of testing hypotheses about the flow and structure of foreign news. A distinction between intra and extra media data is introduced, and finally, the outline of an empirical investigation is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a paper on the response of wages and prices to the first two years on controls initiated by President Richard Nixon. Intent to study the changes in prices and wages behavior. Methodological preliminaries and econometric models; Alternative counterfactual simulations for 1971-73; Untangling the effects of import prices; Conclusion that the inflation of 1973 needs reconsideration; Discussion of the paper by the panel.

In a critique of the paper, "Severity of Formal Sanctions As a Deterrent to Deviant Behavior," in the 1970 issue of the journal "Law and Society Review," scholar Paul E. Meehi has questioned the interpretation of the data in a particular section. On the basis of that evidence, it is concluded that severity of formal sanctions show no direct deterrent effect on the deviant behavior under consideration, but do appear to have an indirect deterrent effect through their impact on the normative climate of the campus. In challenging this interpretation of the data, Meehi expressed concern that non social science readers of the periodical "Law & Society Review," might be misled by the use of "causal language" in the interpretation of these tabulations from cross sectional data. In this extension of earlier analysis, this article attempts to explicate some difficulties in interpreting findings from cross sectional research and how these difficulties can be dealt with. Specifically, it is shown how cross sectional data can serve not only to test predictions of a causal model, but also to evaluate its causal assumptions.

In this article, the author has commented on juvenile delinquency. The purpose of this note is to call attention to a serious oversight in this study, an oversight which has undoubtedly arisen because equal sized groups of delinquents and non-delinquents were studied and comparisons made between percentages of these groups. Non-delinquents are considerably more frequent in the general population than are delinquents. These actual frequencies must be taken into account in evaluating the predictive efficiency of the scoring plan reported. The preparation of prognostic tables for indicating the probability of a child's becoming delinquent, although highly desirable, lies much farther in the future.

This article looks into the statistical methods related to test construction and evaluation. It is noted that while the discussion of the relation of the item to the total test from the standpoint of psychophysics leads to very complex methods of item analysis if rigorous mathematical procedures are followed, practical considerations usually make such a procedure inadvisable is based. In addition, papers devoted to tests of significance cover a wide range, from discussion of the philosophy underlying the use of such tests to the publication of tables and nomographs for use in specific situations.

The article presents a discussion on the paper titled New Developments in the Theory of the Firm by Herbert A. Simon of Carnegie Institute of Technology. The paper will become a valuable contribution to the literature. The paper is both informative and analytical. It tells some of the specific things that have been going on in the study of the firm, without being too detailed or technical, and it gives some enlightening and suggestive interpretations and evaluations, without being too high-flown, abstract, or speculative. It seems that Simon was well advised to avoid the pretentiousness of a full-scale review of the field, and to confine himself to the more modest objective of reporting, for the most part, the work with which, as he says, he is most closely familiar, namely, the work which he, his students, and his colleagues have done. That is an impressive enough body of work, and the paper is an impressive testimonial to the quality, amount, and scope of the work done in the business school at Carnegie Institute of Technology.

This paper establishes an argument that questions the validity of one "test" of goodness-of-fit, for the simulated time path of a single endogenous variable in a simultaneous, perhaps dynamic, econometric model. The test was suggested by Cyert and Cohen, and consists of two parts, within the context of a regression of the actual series on the generated series: a test that the intercept of this regression differs significantly from zero and a test that the slope of this regression differs significantly from one. Presumably, the intuition underlying the test is that if the simulation model is a good one this regression should be a 45° line through the origin. The paper's primary purpose is to demonstrate that this intuition is wrong in general for the case of "stochastic simulation." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent publication of a seminal paper analyzing variation in upward and downward mobility rates should alert social scientists to the possibilities for quantitative research in this intricate field. Like most trail-blazing papers, the analysis is subject to evaluation and a critical analysis at this point may stimulate further profitable research. The comments on the cover five problems. Although it is said that the upward and downward mobility rates used in the paper now under discussion classify farmers as manual workers, this rule is not easily followed. The top panel groups those nations in which the original data, reported farm sons and fathers separately from urban workers. Four studies did not separate farm from urban workers, but placed farmers in a low prestige category. It was decided to use all available nations by including farmers and grouping them with non farm workers. However it is difficult to use the same data and compute mobility rates identical to those obtained especially broken out in the original data. The efforts to reconstruct the identical data resulted in six different upward and six different downward rates.

This paper presents a model for the evaluation of individuals used as sources for subjective information. The evaluation is based upon the amount and nature of the individual's relevant experience and the consistency and completeness of the information he provides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Project appraisal has long been a difficult task in that a number of methods of worth assessment have been proposed which do not necessarily lead to the same conclusion. The purpose of this paper is to bring forth an assessment technique which is theoretically appealing to the manager and is at the same time easy to calculate.
It is felt that one of the disadvantages of conventional assessment techniques is that they neglect the fact that income is not generated as an end of period, lump sum amount but rather that it is distributed over time in some pattern. The method developed in this paper is sensitive to the time variable earning pattern of the project. This is accomplished by utilizing the concepts of a time variable earning rate and continuous compounding.
A number of examples are provided to illustrate the use of the method in cases of uniform, increasing, decreasing and cyclic earning rates, and comparisons are made with the conventional analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the Stochastic Dominance (SD) approach to the evaluation of risky assets. Given a set of portfolios, the familiar EV procedure chooses a set of EV-efficient portfolios while the SD procedures choose SD-efficient sets that usually are quite similar to (but not identical with) the EV-efficient set. The SD approach can be employed as a refinement of the EV model or as an alternative method of evaluating portfolios. The SD view has certain conceptual advantages in the screening of a set of portfolios, but the EV model has the important advantage of an optimizing algorithm that builds efficient portfolios. Also, the SD approach requires more data than the EV approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When slenderness ratios of load bearing rein-forced concrete walls resting on either continuous or isolated footings exceed the limits of ACI 318-71 [klu/r > 100), a detailed evaluation of slenderness is needed. Using numerical analysis procedures, a systematic accounting of the various factors affect-ing the behavior of wall panels is presented here, based on a column model of the panel. Also pre-sented in fhis paper is a typical design aid of a slender wall (30 ≦ klu/h≦ 50) having a thickness of 5 1/2 in- I'4 cm) resting on continuous footings. A rational means of evaluating the effects of iso-lated footings on the ultimate capacity of the slen-der walls is also indicated along with a design example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts of this paper will be directed to an exposition and discussion of the foundational aspects of all requirements which are either directly or indirectly "military." These aspects fall, in their initial phases, almost entirely within the province of the U.S. Department of Defense and the defense ministries of allied countries. Furthermore, these aspects are matters depending materially on judgments which are in great part military and which require some component of professional appraisal by officials, uniformed and civilian, knowledgeable in military matters. The area of dependence on judgment alone is being continually reduced. Methods of scientific analysis of military problems are being improved. Electronic machines are being applied to the appraisal of military needs. Such improvements give greater precision and increased speed and accuracy to estimates of hundreds of thousands of items which, to procurement and production experts, constitute military requirements. But, if only because the potential aggressor is definitely non cooperative toward any reduction of requirements problem to exact scientific definitions, the element of military judgment will always bulk large in requirements equation.

The article author comments on the views of sociologist Raymond F. Sletto on the criterion of internal consistency in personality scale construction. Sletto's paper represents a contribution to an over-neglected task in sociology. It concerns the fundamental question of the applicability of specific methodological presuppositions to social phenomena. Only too frequently have social research techniques been used without the necessary concomitant investigation into their underlying logical foundations, and the applicability of these to the sense world. The field of measurement has suffered its share of this critical inertia in the past; consequently any attempt to examine the assumptions underlying a particular type of measurement should be encouraged by all serious research workers. An adequate critical evaluation of such an analysis as Sletto has given seems to the author to necessitate two points of reference. The analysis should be evaluated with reference to the scientific tradition involved-in this case personality scale construction, and secondly with reference to the broader problem of the adequacy of this tradition in the light of scientific method.

In this paper, a method is proposed for evaluating combinations of investments when the cash flows are not known with certainty. Various probability concepts are employed; and combinations are evaluated according to their incremental contribution of expected net-present value and variance to the firm as a whole. It is shown that existing investment projects must be considered if the total risk of a particular combination of investment proposals is to be evaluated realistically. Through diversification of investments, a firm is able to obtain the most desirable combination of expected net-present value and risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

J. F. Smith (1970) The design of a transportation study with regard to the evaluation of its output, Reg. Studies 4, 193–204. The paper gives a brief summary of the methods of evaluation at present available for the system-wide evaluation of transport predictions. Recognizing two distinct problem areas, the design of studies which consider network options for a single land-use prediction, and the design of studies involving network alternatives and land-use alternatives together, the paper goes on to show how evaluation controls the prediction work which is undertaken for both these cases. Attention is particularly drawn to the difficulties of evaluation for the second case. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses forecast evaluation in accounting. Accounting data are often used in the development of forecasts and accountants are often called on to make forecasts. Development of a variable overhead rate per direct labor hour may, for example, be viewed as development of a forecast--whether it is used in a standard cost system, in a budget, or in a product mix decision. Similarly, establishment of a depreciation policy requires a forecast of service life. Furthermore, the ability to forecast some specific outcome has been offered as a criterion for selection among accounting alternatives. But, whatever its ultimate purpose, development of a forecast constitutes a decision--a conscious choice among alternatives. The concern in this paper is limited to this decision aspect of forecasting. In particular, in the first section it is demonstrated that selection among forecast alternatives is a subset of the accountant's general problem of selection among information alternatives. Following this, characterization is done of prevailing methods of selecting among forecast alternatives as a simplification of the basic information choice problem. The paper then concludes with two illustrative simulations.

The article offers a reply from the authors of the paper "The Markets for Housing and Housing Services" to Craig Swan, who wrote a review of their work. The authors review Swan's comments, including his criticism of their treatment of productivity change and his belief that their model is inappropriate and their estimation procedure is incorrect, resulting in no value to their evidence. In order to address the issues raised about the model, the authors retested the propositions in a way that stays away from Swan's criticisms. The tests and the evidence are provided.

The article discusses the need for human resource accounting through which positional replacement cost is measured. A great deal of the research previously done in human resource accounting has focused upon the problem of accounting for human resource costs, especially historical costs. Although some previous work has been devoted to the replacement cost of human resources, this area has received relatively little systematic investigation. Two of the major applications involve their use in planning and controlling the use of human resources and in developing surrogate measures of an individual's value to a formal organization which, in turn, has additional implications for the management of people. The need for measures of positional replacement cost, has developed a normative model for its measurement, which has presented the results of a study to apply the model in an insurance company, and has suggested some of the implications of measuring such data for management. Accounting systems are designed to measure and communicate data.

The article presents a method for evaluating and reviewing books of compiled readings or readings books, which can be used in conjecture with standard reviewing methods. This method evaluates the newness of information compiled into these types of books, by comparing the citation decay curves of a specific readings book with other similar books. The books tested in this study are in the areas of Organization and Administration, Marketing, and Finance.Because decay rates vary between the different literature fields, comparisons must be made between books in the same field. The author points out that while this method is useful when combined with other methods, it should not a good method when used by itself.

The design of mechanical feeders is very much a matter for experience. This paper illustrates that by experiment and synthesis better understanding of the behaviour of such devices can be achieved. Although the work specifically relates to a particular feeder handling simple cylinders, the exercise is capable of wider interpretation and the techniques evaluated could be applied in a wider sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few evaluation studies of organization development programmes have been carried out because of the inherent difficulties. This paper describes a case study which explored a critical incidents approach to evaluation. The results suggest that Phase 2 of the Managerial Grid facilitated the occurrence of certain changes which were perceived by the top management team involved as beneficial to organizational effectiveness. Although certain weaknesses in the critical incidents approach were identified, the method is sufficiently promising to be applied in a controlled study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Programs of education in industrial engineering, operations research, and management science should be based upon definitions of the respective fields, upon a concept of the present and future scopes and limitations of professional activity in these fields, as well as upon an evaluation of what academic disciplines provide the most suitable preparation for the respective professional activities. This paper examines these subjects and concludes that educational programs for these professions should have much in common and that, although a wide variety of quite different types of educational experience can provide the basis for professional work in industrial engineering and in operations research, these educational programs should emphasize the system and the decision-making approaches to the science, engineering, and practice of management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cost-benefit analyses of urban renewal have generally not investigated the changes in local government expenditures generated by a project, although it is recognized that these may constitute an important source of benefits. This study seeks to measure the changes. It first outlines the qualitative effects of urban renewal projects on population, housing, and other characteristics of a city. The relationship between these characteristics and expenditures for several government services is then estimated. These results are used to calculate the expenditure reductions generated by one project in Chicago; the savings are probably less than 10 percent of project costs. This paper contributes to the cost-benefit analysis of residential urban renewal by developing a technique for measuring the effect of urban renewal upon municipal public service expenditures, which is one aspect of its effect upon "slum-generated social costs." This term was coined by Rothenberg (1965, p. 338) to cover a variety of unpleasant phenomena which local governments attempt to prevent or ameliorate: crime, fires, disease and other health problems, and individual personality difficulties. There is substantial agreement in the recent literature that changes in the incidence of these phenomena are among the most important effects of urban renewal, but unfortunately are also among the most difficult to measure (Rothenberg 1965, p. 332; 1967, p. 17; Mao 1966; Messner 1968). By analyzing the effect of urban renewal on service expenditures, this paper narrows the range of unmeasurable benefits of urban renewal, permitting greater precision in the evaluation of projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study about the theoretical approach to a study of chalk grassland in England. This paper focuses on the six parts that make up the studies recorded in the past. A brief review of the history in literature of British Chalk Grassland is presented showing the general framework of the previous studies. Different variables in soil formation is detailed and the concepts in vegetation analysis are discussed featuring a functional approach which is a valuable tool in the assessment of various factors affecting the ecosystem balance.

This paper attempts to evaluate rehabilitation programs by focusing upon the transactions at the boundaries of an organization and upon the social roles of delinquent boys. The social roles are examined before and shortly after the boys enter a treatment organization to determine whether inmates reproduce their delinquent, community social roles in the rehabilitative organization and whether these roles are modified as pan of the treatment. The research demonstrates that inmates reproduce delinquent social roles within the treatment organization and that these roles, over time, are subsequently modified. Differences in the amount of modification and kind of duplication for gang and non-gang delinquents suggest that different organizational structures can inhibit or facilitate deviant community roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic question posed is: How can a model of a major urban and/or regional subsystem (e.g. housing, health, education or transportation) be developed to maximize its utility for public policymakers? A technique to be used in the evaluation of the utility of such a model is presented. The proposed technique involves the construction of a utility evaluation matrix. In constructing this matrix it is necessary to identify the following: (a) the potential users of the model, (b) the actions open to these users, and (c) the consequences which are considered by the users when evaluating alternative actions. Utility testing should become as commonplace and important as validity testing. The utility evaluation technique described in this paper is hardly the required test, but at least it can be viewed as a step in the right direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personality scale in its developmental stage usually contains some items that are not sufficiently discriminating to justify their retention in the final form of the scale. The criterion of internal consistency is frequently utilized to select the more discriminative items. It is essentially the use of total score on all items of a scale to evaluate each individual item. In the application of this criterion all items are scored according to uniform arbitrary scoring weights, and these total scores are placed in an array. Next, papers are segregated for persons whose total scores place them in the extremes of the array. The proportion included in these extreme segments has varied widely from one study to another; deciles, quartiles, quintiles and other proportions have been employed. Whatever the proportion used, the segments drawn from each extreme of the array are equal in the number of persons they contain. Item responses are tabulated separately for the two extreme segments. The extent to which an item yields response differentiating between them is the measure of its discriminative value in the scale. The statistical significance of this discriminative value is usually determined by computing the critical ratio.

‘Rural’ is variously used to designate both physical areas and individuals, and to refer to three different substantive aspects: (1) an ecological facet, (2) an occupational dimension, and (3) a cultural complex. In this paper, using multiple correlation analysis, such a composite definition is empirically evaluated for its power, breadth, consistency, and meaningfulness of interpretation. Ten dependent behaviors solicited from a large sample of Pennsylvania adolescents are used as the test data. The ‘rurality’ components are shown to be low in power, inconsistent in breadth, and confusing in meaningfulness. The authors suggest, therefore, that a composite definition offering constant weightings to the various factors may obfuscate more than it enlightens. Such a conclusion must be tentative, however, due to the limited qualities of the sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a general view and evaluation of rural research in Brazil. The beginnings of rural research and the main orientations during its early development are reviewed. Three fields are then analyzed more thoroughly: community studies, regional investigations, and problem oriented research. Although relatively few in number, the community studies have nevertheless served to illustrate the most varied types of social structure in Brazil. General regional surveys are numerous and are concerned principally with cultural and ecological aspects of society; most of Brazil's varied regions have been studied in this fashion. Problem-oriented research, on the other hand, is fairly recent and as yet unsystematic. The main problem areas that have been emphasized are: immigration and assimilation, internal migrations, messianic movements, and more recently, class relations and land tenure problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we have examined the problem of evaluating from two viewpoints. Firstly, one would like to know how good is a particular set of forecasts. Our recommendations for possible answers to this question are set out in Section 6 of this paper. Of particular importance in this respect is the concept of conditional efficiency, introduced in Section 5. Secondly, in Section 7 we indicate a number of diagnostic checks on forecast adequacy which ought to be made. In a good deal of econometric work tests against serial correlation in the forecast errors should prove particularly useful in this context. We have attempted throughout this paper to discuss the validity of various evaluation techniques which have been proposed in the past, and have concluded that a number of these can lead to misleading interpretations. The difficulty, as we noted in Section 2, appears to be in the fact that, for a 'good' set of forecasts, the time series and distributional properties of the predictor series generally differ from these of the predicted series. Finally, it must be admitted that the choice of cost function can be of great importance in any evaluation exercise. Throughout this paper we have employed, as dictated by mathematical convenience, the usual least squares criterion. We have shown, however, in Section 3 that if one is interested only in ordinal judgements this choice may not be too crucial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eight methods of determining the coefficient of variation of yarns or slivers when only a limited amount of material is available are discussed. The basic method involves direct measurement and calculation, and each of the other methods is compared with this one, which tends to be somewhat lengthy, for a range of man-made-fibre yams spun on the cotton system. A method based on the use of the cumulative-frequency distribution is shown to be quite the most accurate of the seven methods investigated and has the merit that it can be performed comparatively rapidly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the investigation of the self-evaluation approaches used by college instructors in physical science in improving their instruction. It provides information on how the information reported in this paper was gathered. It describes the frequency of use of self-evaluation tools by physical science instructors. A comparison of physical science instructors with instructors in other fields is examined. Furthermore, it also enumerates the additional self-evaluation procedures volunteered and suggested by instructors which they have found useful.