John C. Nash

Strategic decisions and innovation in construction firms

Current research on the process of innovation has focused attention on the crucial role of the business firm as the place where new ideas are developed and then implemented in the marketplace. Based on current knowledge, a model was developed which attempts to replicate the strategic decision‐making process in a construction firm. It links perceived business environment variables to various business strategy variables (i.e. marketing, human resources and technology). These two sets of variables are linked to the innovativeness of the firm, measured by the number of advanced technologies and/or business practices currently used. Innovativeness is subsequently linked to outcomes (i.e. profitability, competitive advantage) to assess overall effectiveness. The model was tested empirically, using data from the Survey on Innovation, Advanced Technologies and Practices in the Construction and Related Industries carried out by Statistics Canada in 1999 with 1739 usable responses. The results generally support the proposed model; certain perceived business environment and business strategy variables are significantly related to firm innovativeness, however the link between innovativeness and outcomes requires further confirmation. Many construction firms introduce new approaches in information and construction technologies as well as in business practices. A large number of these were found to provide significant competitive advantage. In general, innovative behaviour varies with the size of the firm.

Strategies for fitting nonlinear ecological models in R, AD Model Builder, and BUGS

1. Ecologists often use nonlinear fitting techniques to estimate the parameters of complex ecological models, with attendant frustration. This paper compares three open-source model fitting tools and discusses general strategies for defining and fitting models. 2. R is convenient and (relatively) easy to learn, AD Model Builder is fast and robust but comes with a steep learning curve, while BUGS provides the greatest flexibility at the price of speed. 3. Our model-fitting suggestions range from general cultural advice (where possible, use the tools and models that are most common in your subfield) to specific suggestions about how to change the mathematical description of models to make them more amenable to parameter estimation. 4. A companion web site (https://groups.nceas.ucsb.edu/nonlinear-modeling/projects) presents detailed examples of application of the three tools to a variety of typical ecological estimation problems; each example links both to a detailed project report and to full source code and data.

Evaluating and implementing a collaborative office document system

Collaborative work with office suite documents such as word processing, spreadsheet and presentation files usually demands special tools and methods. For this application, we have developed TellTable, a relatively simple web-based framework built largely from available software and infrastructure. TellTable allows the use of existing office-suite software in a collaborative manner that is controlled but is familiar to users of common single user software. From the literature and our research, we identify twelve challenges to collaborative editing software that we use in an evaluation checklist: time and space, awareness, communication, private and shared work spaces, intellectual property, simultaneity and locking, protection, workflow, security, file format, platform independence, and user benefit. We then use this checklist to characterize TellTable in comparison to some other collaborative office tools.

Spreadsheets in Statistical Practice—Another Look

Many authors have criticized the use of spreadsheets for statistical data processing and computing because of incorrect statistical functions, no log file or audit trail, inconsistent behavior of computational dialogs, and poor handling of missing values. Some improvements in some spreadsheet processors and the possibility of audit trail facilities suggest that the use of a spreadsheet for some statistical data entry and simple analysis tasks may now be acceptable. A brief outline of some issues and some guidelines for good practice are included.

Teaching statistics with Excel 2007 and other spreadsheets

This article considers which activities in teaching statistics may be suitable candidates for the application of spreadsheets, and whether spreadsheets in general and Excel 2007 in particular are suitable for these tasks.

Design and implementation of a very small linear algebra program package

Microcomputers, when properly programmed, have sufficient memory and speed to successfully perform serious calculations of modest size--linear equations, least squares, matrix inverse or generalized inverse, and the symmetric matrix eigenproblem.

Using Compact And Portable Function Minimization Codes In Forecasting Applications

AbstractThe purpose of this paper is to show how direct application of some compact methods for finding the minimum of a non-linear function may be a useful strategy for business and economic forecasting problems, particularly if only limited computational resources are available. While conventional forecasting methods use minimization techniques implicitly, this paper proposes that they be applied more or less directly by the forecasting practitioner as a general technique which puts all models for forecasting within a common framework adaptable to new situations. As such, the aim is to provide a portable, practical tool for matiy problems. While the overall cost-benefit of this approach is still under investigation, it has worked well for some examples.

A hypertext environment for using mathematical software: part 1—motivations and design objectives

Two perennial obstacles to the effective use of software, and especially mathematical software, are its documentation and its user-accessibility. This article surveys some of the ways in which software providers address the issues of documentation and use of their products, and suggests an alternative mechanism for both documentation and access via a hypertext database and command processor. Some considerations relating to program size and complexity and to the security of computer applications are discussed.

Computer-Based Assessment: From Objective Tests to Automated Essay Grading. Now for Automated Essay Writing?

Assessment of student learning is an important task undertaken by educators. However it can be time consuming and costly for humans to grade student work. Technology has been available to assist teachers in grading objective tests for several decades; however these true-false and multiple choice tests do not capture the deeper aspects of student learning. Essay writing can be used to assess this deeper learning, which includes a student’s ability to synthesize his/her thoughts, and argue for propositions. Automated essay grading systems are now starting to be used in the educational sector with some success. They can reduce the cost of grading, and they also eliminate the inconsistencies that are found amongst human graders when marking the same essay. The next development in essay processing technology is automated essay writing. This development will present a new set of challenges for educators. The detection of automatically generated essays may be difficult, and students may be given credit for writing which does not reflect their true ability. An understanding of how these systems would work, and the characteristics of the generated essays, is thus needed in order to detect them. This paper describes the components we believe an automated essay generator would need to have, and the results of building a prototype of the first of these components, the Gatherer.

Statistical Shareware: Illustrations from Regression Techniques

Abstract The role of shareware statistical packages in the development of statistical methodology and in the education of the community of statistical analysts is examined via comparative reviews of several low-cost statistical packages relating to regression computations.