T paper examines the staffing, division of labor, and resulting profitability of primary care physician practices. Division of labor is viewed as a mechanism to increase the efficiency of production processes through specialization. At the same time, division of labor also introduces coordination cost as handoffs and communication needs increase. We attempt to empirically assess the net effect ...

Thomas Christiano claims that one of the fundamental challenges democracy is faced with is the appropriate division of epistemic labor between citizens and experts. In this article I try to present and analyze Christiano’s solution from the perspective of social epistemology while utilizing the concepts and tools provided by this discipline. Despite fundamentally agreeing with his position, I a...

Female agricultural contributions decline with agricultural intensification. W e formulate a n d test a theory of t h e processes of agricultural intensi fcation that explains a high proportion o f t h e variance i n female contributions t o agriculture. Five variables show replicable effects across two or more regions o f t h e world. These are n u m b e r o f d r y months , importance of dome...

Douglas McDonald: There are three basic ways that criminal justice agencies and drug treatment programs can interact: (1) justice agency employees conduct screening and assessment and refer patients to independ­ ent organizations for treatment; (2) a jus­ tice agency contracts with a treatment organ­ ization to screen, assess, place, and treat patients; and (3) a justice agency engages an inter...

Although evident progress and considerable achievements have been attained in developing a new particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, successfully balancing the exploration and exploitation capabilities of PSO to determine high-quality solutions for complex optimization problems remains a fundamental challenge. In this study, we propose a new PSO variant, namely, adaptive division of labo...

Interim Reports on work of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis receive only limited review. Views or opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent those of the Institute, its National Member Organizations, or other organizations supporting the work. Abstract China's urban labor market has been under growing pressure to meet the large job demands that are resulting ...

Modelling the behavior of social insects has attracted much research recently. Although honey–bees exhibit many features that encourage their use as models for intelligent behavior, up to our knowledge, no attempt for using honey-bees as a basis for optimization has been made in the literature. Some of the features that distinguish honey–bees are division of labor, communication on the individu...

Q-learning as well as other learning paradigms depend strongly on the representation of the underlying state space. As a special case of the hidden state problem we investigate the e ect of a self-organizing discretization of the state space in a simple control problem. We apply the neural gas algorithm with adaptation of learning rate and neighborhood range to a simulated cart-pole problem. Th...

Dendritic cells induce the activation of CD8 and CD4 T cells by presenting antigenic peptides on MHC class I and class II molecules, respectively. In a recent Science paper, Dudziak et al. (2007) reveal that these tasks are handled by distinct populations of dendritic cells in vivo.