18 research outputs found
Scarlet Knights, Red Crusade: An Analysis of the Great Red Scare at Rutgers-New Brunswick
No full textThe Paul A. Stellhorn Undergraduate Paper in New Jersey History Award was established in 2004 to honor Paul A. Stellhorn (1947-2001), a distinguished historian and public servant who worked for the New Jersey Historical Commission, the New Jersey Committee (now Council) for the Humanities, and the Newark Pubic Library. An especially active and effective member of the New Jersey history community, he did much to expand the audience for New Jersey history and was an effective advocate for public history and a vigorous supporter of scholarship and publication about the state’s history. As a program officer and a grants administrator he helped many of our present historians and humanities scholars to achieve their goals, whether as scholars, history agency personnel, or educators. He earned a Ph.D. in American History from Rutgers University with a dissertation about Newark during the era of the Great Depression. He was the author or editor of many works about New Jersey’s past, especially about its urban history. The Stellhorn Awards consist of a framed certificate and a modest cash award, presented at the New Jersey Historical Commission’s Annual Conference. The Award’s sponsors are the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance; the New Jersey Historical Commission, New Jersey Department of State; Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries; the New Jersey Caucus, Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference; and the New Jersey Council for History Education. The Stellhorn Award Committee members are Richard Waldron (chair), Mark Lender, Brooke Hunter, and Peter Mickulas. Click here for more information. The following paper by Mr. Federowicz, nominated by Professor Richard L. McCormick, was one of two 2017 winners.</jats:p
The use of elements of management system according to the SCC:2011 standard for creating a safety culture and employees’ commitment to the OHS in polish enterprises
No full textSystem SCC (ang. Safety Checklistfor Contractors) to system zarządzania bezpieczeństwem, zdrowiem i środowiskiem, zyskujący w ostatnich latach popularność w Polsce, a jednocześnie jeden z najszerzej stosowanych systemów zarządzania bezpieczeństwem w Europie. Jednym z czynników mających wpływ na rosnące zainteresowanie systemem SCC, poza jego przejrzystością i dobrym skorelowaniem z krajowymi przepisami bhp, może być jego bezpośrednia przydatność w kreowaniu pozytywnych postaw i zaangażowania pracowników w sprawy bhp przedsiębiorstwa. W artykule przedstawiono wybrane wymagania normy SCC:2011, stanowiące jednocześnie narzędzia z obszaru edukacji, a służące do właściwego przygotowania pracowników do wykonywania prac szczególnie niebezpiecznych. Omówiono wymagania dla certyfikacji personalnej, zarówno pracowników operacyjnych, jak i kadry zarządzającej oraz bezpośredniego nadzoru. Przedstawiono przykłady sposobu realizacji szkoleń, instruktarzy i spotkań narzędziowych bhp (safety-toolbox-meeting), zgodnie z normą SCC:2011. W opracowaniu przedstawiona została również idea modyfikacji tradycyjnego modelu realizacji szkoleń okresowych bhp, pozwalająca na zmniejszenie zjawiska oporu i zniechęcenia ze strony uczestników, jak również na uniknięcie powszechnych zjawisk patologicznych w obszarze szkoleń okresowych. Tezy stawiane w opracowaniu przez autora, audytora wiodącego systemów zarządzania wg normy SCC, poparte zostały analizami i obserwacjami funkcjonujących systemów zarządzania wdrożonych i certyfikowanych w kilkunastu polskich przedsiębiorstwach.The SCC (Safety Checklist for Contractors) is a system for managing safety, health and the environment, gaining the popularity in recent years in Poland, and one of the most widely used safety management systems in Europe. One of the factors affecting the growing interest in the SCC system, beyond its transparency and good correlation with national health and safety regulations, may be its direct usefulness in creating the positive attitudes and the involvement of employees in the OHS issues of the company. The author presents the selected requirements of the SCC: 2011 standard, which are also the tools in the education, and used to prepare employees to perform particularly hazardous works. The paper discusses the requirements for the certification of personnel, both operational staff, management and the direct supervisors. The author shows some examples of the implementation of trainings, instructions and safety meetings according to the SCC: 2011 standard. The paper presents the idea of the traditional model of periodic safety training modification, which allows to reduce the level of resistance and discouragement of participants, as well as gives a chance to avoid widespread pathological phenomena in the area of periodic safety trainings. The thesis presented by the author – the leading auditor of management systems according to the SCC standard, have been supported by the analysis and observations of the management systems implemented and certified in several Polish companies
The enterprise sector and emergence of the Polish fiscal crisis, 1990-91
No full textThe author analyzes the causes of the collapse of profitability in 1991 of the Polish enterprise sector. He explores how it affected the government budget and assesses the forecasts of enterprise sector performance used to prepare the government's 1990 and 1991 budgets. About half of the drop in profitability he attributes to the decrease in the inflation rate and the consequent decrease in the inflation bias in profits that results from historical cost accounting. He attributes most of the rest of the collapse in profitability to higher labor costs and higher amortization allowances. When wages are endogenized in a simple model, nearly the entire collapse of profitability is explained by the changes in inflation bias and amortization allowances. The decrease in the inflation bias and the increase in amortization allowances caused profits, and thus profit taxes, to fall, freeing up cash that could be spent on wages, causing profits and profit taxes to fall even further. This loss in government revenues was offset by increased revenues from wage taxes, which were in turn offset by an increase in wage indexed government spending, notably on pensions. As a result of all these changes, the government deficit increased about 4 to 5 percent of GDP - about half of the fiscal swing between 1990 and 1991. Policy options recommended for increasing tax revenues include: increasing the turnover tax rate and introducing the value added tax that will replace it at rates that maintain the increased level of revenue; increasing the social security tax rate; and maintaining, but not raising, the historical cost based profit tax, an automatic stabilizer. An obvious alternative to the profit tax based on historical cost accounting is to redress 1991 mistake, the indexing of amortization deductions. The author recommends drastically reducing or even abolishing amortization deductions for state owned enterprises for fixed capital acquired before 1990 (before the start of the transition from socialism). It is odd that these firms are given a tax break on top of the free use of state owned capital. If anything, they should be paying for the use of the capital.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management
Robustness of Posynomial Geometric Programming Optima
No full textThis paper develops a simple bounding procedure for the optimal value of a posynomial geometric programming (GP) problem when some of the coefficients for terms in the problem's objective function are estimated with error. The bound may be computed even before the problem is solved and it is shown analytically that the optimum value is very insensitive to errors in the coefficients; for example, a 20% error could cause the optimum to be wrong by no more than 1.67%. Key Words: Geometric Programming, Posynomials, Sensitivity Analysis *Corresponding Author Address: Department of Industrial Engineering 1048 Benedum Hall University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15261 e-mail: [email protected] fax: (412) 624-9831 1 Introduction Geometric Programming (GP) is a technique for solving certain classes of algebraic nonlinear optimization problems. Since its original development by Duffin, Peterson and Zener (1967) at the Westinghouse R & D Center, it has been studied extensively and..
Institutions and Economic Growth: The Successful Experience of Switzerland (1870-1950)
No full texteconomic growth, institutions, Switzerland, small countries
Enhancing the Fresh and Early Age Performances of Portland Cement Pastes via Sol-Gel Silica Coating of Metal Oxides (Bi2O3 and Gd2O3)
No full textData Availability Statement: The datasets generated and/or analyzed during this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.Copyright © 2023 by the authors. Incorporating metal oxide nanoparticles into cement-based composites delays the hydration process and strength gain of cementitious composites. This study presents an approach toward improving the performance of bismuth oxide (Bi2O3) and gadolinium oxide (Gd2O3) particles in cementitious systems by synthesizing core–shell structures via a sol-gel process. Two types of silica coatings on cementitious pastes with 5% and 10% substitution levels were proposed. The rheology, hydration, and mechanical properties of the pastes were analyzed to determine the relationship between the coating type and nanoparticle concentration. The results indicate that despite the significant disparities in the performance of the resulting material, both methods are appropriate for cement technology applications. Bi2O3’s silica coatings accelerate the hydration process, leading to early strength development in the cement paste. However, due to the coarse particle size of Gd2O3, silica coatings exhibited negligible effects on the early age characteristics of cement pastes.National Science Centre, Poland (project no. 2020/39/D/ST8/00975 (SONATA-16))
CyAnimator: Simple Animations of Cytoscape Networks.
No full textCyAnimator (http://apps.cytoscape.org/apps/cyanimator) is a Cytoscape app that provides a tool for simple animations of Cytoscape networks. The tool allows you to take a series of snapshots (CyAnimator calls them frames) of Cytoscape networks. For example
CyAnimator: Simple Animations of Cytoscape Networks [version 2; referees: 2 approved, 1 approved with reservations]
No full textCyAnimator (http://apps.cytoscape.org/apps/cyanimator) is a Cytoscape app that provides a tool for simple animations of Cytoscape networks. The tool allows you to take a series of snapshots (CyAnimator calls them frames) of Cytoscape networks. For example, the first frame might be of a network shown from a ”zoomed out” viewpoint and the second frame might focus on a specific group of nodes. Once these two frames are captured by the tool, it can animate between them by interpolating the changes in location, zoom, node color, node size, edge thickness, presence or absence of annotations, etc. The animations may be saved as a series of individual frames, animated GIFs, or H.264/MP4 movies. CyAnimator is available from within the Cytoscape App Manager or from the Cytoscape app store
The Impact of the 1999 Education Reform in Poland
No full textIncreasing the share of vocational secondary schooling has been a mainstay of development policy for decades, perhaps nowhere more so than in formerly socialist countries. The transition, however, led to significant restructuring of school systems, including a declining share of vocational students. Exposing more students to a general curriculum could improve academic abilities. This paper analyzes Poland’s significant improvement in international achievement tests and the restructuring of the education system that expanded general schooling to test the hypothesis that delayed vocational streaming improves outcomes. Using propensity score matching and differences-in-differences estimates, the authors show that delayed vocationalization had a positive and significant impact on student performance on the order of one standard deviation.education, streaming, tracking, curriculum
The impact of the 1999 education reform in Poland
No full textIncreasing the share of vocational secondary schooling has been a mainstay of development policy for decades, perhaps nowhere more so than in formerly socialist countries. The transition, however, led to significant restructuring of school systems, including a declining share of vocational students. Exposing more students to a general curriculum could improve academic abilities. This paper analyzes Poland’s significant improvement in international achievement tests and the restructuring of the education system that expanded general schooling to test the hypothesis that delayed vocational streaming improves outcomes. Using propensity score matching and differences-in-differences estimates, the authors show that delayed vocationalization had a positive and significant impact on student performance on the order of one standard deviation.Tertiary Education,Secondary Education,Education For All,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning
