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Appointment scheduling is critical for logistic parks of manufacturing industry firms to manage inventory turnover and schedule service objects. This work studies the appointment scheduling problem of a logistic park considering truck heterogeneity and order fulfillment delay, where the number of time windows in a day, the number of each type of appointment slot, and the service schedule in each time window are decided. The objective is to minimise the expected total cost of the truck waiting time, inventory, and overtime. We introduce a weighted shortest processing time first scheduling rule to determine the service sequence in each time window and prove that it generates optimal scheduling solutions. Based on our proposed scheduling rule, we develop a recursive calculation to formulate the cost function, which provides a tractable approach to solving combinatorially complex problems. The proposed model is solved by a dual-selection based genetic algorithm (DSGA). The performance of the DSGA is validated by comparing it to a genetic algorithm using a single tournament selection operation. Our experimental results show that the DSGA enlarges the size of subgroups with better fitness and therefore performs satisfactorily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online news can be shared and promoted via social media, mobile push messages, newsletters, "most read" boxes, or the like. This can result in feedback loops, in which views attract even more views. Using full click logs for five regional newspapers in the Netherlands, spanning $N_{{\rm views}} =$ N views = 12,108,263 views of $N_{{\rm articles}}=$ N articles = 17,982 articles for each minute over the course of 13 weeks, we shed light on potential feedback loops. While article placement and promotion decisions indeed increase their views, we find these effects to be short-lived, contradicting the feedback-loop hypothesis. Exceptions in line with the feedback-loop hypothesis mostly concern social media: If an article is spread via social media, it is not only clicked more, but also clicked on for a longer period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS), this study finds that migrants' housing expenditure pressure is negatively associated with their physical health. And the impact is mainly reflected in three aspects: the crowding-out effect, overtime working effect, and psychological anxiety effect. The association between migrants' housing expenditure pressure and their physical health varies across individual characteristics and home ownership types. Our findings carry many policy implications from the perspective of improving the physical health level of migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

America is said to be more polarized than ever before, and extensive research examines the causes and effects of political polarization. A less studied but more pronounced trend is that citizens perceive society and politics as sharply divided. We focus on news exposure as a key reason for these perceptions. We disentangle the unique effects of exposure to partisan outlets and to news coverage of polarization in general, whether in partisan or centrist news media. We rely on 9 months of online behavioral data (127,400,000 visits) from large samples in the U.S. and Poland (total N = 2,462 & 2,120), paired with a three-wave panel survey on participants' attitudes and perceptions. We measure individual exposure, over-time and unobtrusively, to partisan outlets as well as to news coverage of polarization through a fine-tuned BERT-based machine learning classifier. We find that both exposures increase perceived polarization, independently, in both countries. Yet, in both contexts, it is news coverage of polarization, regardless of whether it is ideologically left, right, or centrist news outlets, that is the strongest driver of perceived polarization. These changes are confined to personal-level polarization (perceived distance between oneself and members of the opposing party), while no measure significantly influences perceptions of society, more generally, as being polarized. These findings have important implications for our understanding of how the media’s increasing tendency to focus on conflict as a central reporting frame can be the driver of often exaggerated perceptions of partisan divisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's fertility rate continues to decline despite government fertility policies. This study aims to explore the micro-level causes of China's declining fertility rate by examining the impact of changes in Chinese work patterns in recent years, particularly the prevalence of overtime work, on fertility intentions. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this study examines the impact of overtime work on fertility intentions at both the provincial and urban levels. It also examines the specific mechanisms through which different types of overtime (e.g. weekend overtime, night shifts, on-call duty) affect fertility intentions. The results show that overtime work significantly inhibits fertility intentions, a trend that is consistent at both provincial and urban levels. Weekend overtime, night shifts, and on-call duties exhibit particularly pronounced inhibitory effects on fertility intentions. However, not all work arrangements negatively impact fertility intentions. Reasonable work schedules may even foster them. The research implies the need for policy measures to mitigate the negative effects of overtime work on fertility intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the recent and sharp rise in psychedelic research, few studies have investigated how classic psychedelic use relates to employees' work-related outcomes. This is surprising given that the increased use, decriminalization, and legalization of classic psychedelics in the United States (U.S.) has the potential to impact both employees and their organizations. Addressing this gap, the current study explores how employees' lifetime psilocybin use relates to the amount of overtime they work, thereby offering insight into what current trends in psilocybin use could mean for businesses. Using pooled, cross-sectional data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2002–2014) on 217,963 adults employed in the U.S. full-time, this study tests whether lifetime psilocybin use is associated with employees' number of overtime hours worked in the past week. After adjusting for sociodemographics and other substance use, a significant negative association is found between employees' lifetime psilocybin use and the amount of overtime they reported working. Specifically, the findings suggest that lifetime psilocybin use in the U.S. full-time working population is associated with an estimated 44,348,400 fewer overtime hours worked per year and may help explain recent findings linking employees' lifetime psilocybin use to a reduction in sick leave taken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most studies on news repertoires and the linkage between media use and (mis)perceptions of social and political matters, the use of political alternative media has not been included. In this paper, we therefore investigate how people combine both traditional and political alternative media into different media repertoires, and how these media repertoires are related to misperceptions. We rely on a two-wave panel survey, conducted in 2020 and 2021, with a probability-recruited sample of the Swedish population. Measures on the use of a wide range of media, including political alternative ones, are used to conduct a Latent Profile Analysis. This analysis distinguishes five media repertoires in the data. The results show that these repertoires coincide with different levels of misperceptions, with those dominated by TV use showing higher levels of misperceptions and those with higher newspaper and alternative media use showing lower levels of misperceptions. Results also show that media repertoires do not affect over-time changes in misperceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contention over COVID-19 is only a recent example of increasing social division around science in the U.S. Many blame these divisions on actors who have strategically sowed doubt and distrust around expert supported positions and policies. However, this overlooks how scientists have fueled narratives of social and political conflict around science. This study explores how science influencers on social media have used group identity language in ways that may perpetuate narratives of intergroup conflict around science. Using computer-assisted content analytic methods, we examine how science influencers' use of group identity language has changed in response to recent events (Trump presidency, COVID-19 pandemic) and across different social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram). While there are slight increases in group identity language between 2016 and 2021, different patterns across platforms suggest that science influencers use different platforms to perform multiple roles of engaging diverse audiences, building ingroup solidarity, and defending against outgroup criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies an industrial lot-sizing and scheduling problem coming from the food-industry that extends the multi-item capacitated lot-sizing and includes lost sales, overtimes, safety stock and non-uniform sequence-dependent setups on parallel machines. We introduce two different formulations and adapt the well-known Relax-and-Fix and Fix-and-Optimise heuristics in order to quickly obtain feasible solutions on large industrial instances. The complexity of our problem prevents the procedure to obtain good solutions within the time allocated by practitioners on real-life cases, hence we propose to use a clustering approach to approximate the sequence-dependent setup times. The resulting problem is significantly smaller to solve and experimental results suggest that this transformation effectively improves the solutions found on industrial instances. In particular, the combination of this clustering method and Relax-and-Fix and Fix-and-Optimise procedure turns out to be a promising approach to obtain good solutions in the given time-limit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances the literature on the spatial patterns of EU support by arguing that the relationship between regional inequality and EU trust is not linear. We posit that, to fully understand this relationship, we should systematically investigate three dimensions of regional inequality, i.e., regional wealth status, regional wealth growth, and regional wealth growth at different levels of wealth status. Using individual-level survey data for EU27 countries and the UK from 11 Eurobarometer waves (2015–2019), we show that a non-linear association exists whereby poor and rich European regions tend to trust the EU more compared to middle-income regions, and that within-region over-time growth is associated with higher levels of EU trust. We demonstrate that the association between growth and EU trust is more pronounced among poor and middle-income regions compared to rich regions. Our findings have implications about the nature of public Euroscepticism and the ways in which to address it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unprecedented power of Big Tech corporations and the complexity of regulating them requires considering the role of news media as a corporate accountability mechanism. The aim of this article is to examine news media's watchdog role through a performative lens, extending it to the corporate context by looking at three manifestations of performance: media visibility, way of coverage, and sourcing patterns. Based on a longitudinal quantitative content analysis of 920 news stories on Big Tech from four media outlets (2000–2021) in the United States and Germany, we explain variances in the watchdog role taking an over-time, cross-country, and cross-political leaning perspective. Our findings suggest that Big Tech corporations receive little but increasing media attention over the years that is driven by events. Similarly, news coverage contains an increasingly strong presence of a detached watchdog role performance. A more interventionist watchdog role is also on the rise – even though marginally – and political actors are increasingly given a voice in news coverage. From a comparative perspective, our results show that Big Tech corporations are more visible in the US and across right leaning news outlets. US journalists exhibit a more detached approach, while German journalists perform a significantly higher interventionist performance. Corporate sources are overall prominent in the media arena yet dominate more in the US. In conclusion, US and German news media are critical but passive observers over Big Tech corporations and can therefore be labeled a tame yet increasingly growling watchdog when it comes to holding Big Tech accountable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prolonged heat exposure may cause various physiological responses to outdoor workers. This will result in economic and productivity losses for a company and also may affect the sustainable development speed of cities. To avoid the above adverse effects, an alerting system is designed for outdoor workers to prevent them from overtime working in high-temperature scenarios. In the system, multiple sensors embedded micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) wearable device is used for real-time working status data collection, and a hybrid deep learning model is adopted to recognise the working status of outdoor workers. This hybrid model, called C-LSTM, combines the advantages of convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory networks (LSTM) to extract useful spatial and temporal features of working status efficiently. Experimental results show that the performance on the inference time and accuracy of the C-LSTM model is better than that of conventional ones. The working status recognition accuracy of the C-LSTM model reaches 97.91%, and the inference time of the model reduces to less than 51 ms. In addition, the C-LSTM model has the best stability. The designed system can not only be used in outdoor high-temperature environment but also applied to medical and industrial scenarios, which further extends the application fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and observers attribute many democratic benefits to local news media. This paper examines exposure to local and national news media websites, side-by-side in one model, testing their over-time effects on political participation, knowledge, and affective and attitude polarization. We test whether traditionally disengaged or disadvantaged groups (i.e., racial minorities, those with low education levels, politically disinterested, and those who do not consume national news), may particularly benefit from local news consumption. To this end, we combine three-wave panel surveys (final N = 740) with 9 months worth of web browsing data submitted by the same participants (36 million visits). We identify exposure to local and national news sites using an extensive list of news domains. The results offer a robust pattern of null findings. Actual online exposure to local news has no over-time effects on the tested outcomes. Also, exposure to local news sites does not exert especially strong effects among the tested sub-groups. We attribute these results to the fact that news visits account for a small fraction of citizens' online activities, less than 2% in our trace data. Our project suggests the need to evaluate the effects of local news consumption on the individual level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent do individual members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have policy and ideological incentives to vote against their European Political Groups (EPGs) and national party delegations (NPDs), and how often they act on these by voting against the party line? Documenting over-time variations in incentives to dissent in floor votes using five waves of surveys of MEPs, covering the years 1994–2019, this article shows that while these have generally decreased over time, they remain substantial. Further, by combining individual floor voting records on legislation and individual MEP survey responses for the 2004–2009 EP, the article shows that while individual MEP preferences significantly influence the decision to dissent from the EPG line in floor votes, this is not the case for voting against their NPD, lending support to the argument that the primary principal for MEPs is their national party, not their EPG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the relationship between overtime and corporate codes of conduct in the global electronics industry through a cultural political economy perspective. First, drawing on examples from China, it considers how the changing political economy of global production has contributed to the emergence of illicit overtime in the electronics industry. The article examines the endemic use of excessive working hours at the first-tier supplier level and explains it as a systemic method to sustain competitive accumulation in a sector characterized by tight production cycles. Second, the article analyzes the economic imaginary that supports the use of overtime and the accompanying mechanisms that institutionalize it as a material practice. It shows that the Responsible Business Alliance Code of Conduct plays a crucial role in reproducing illicit conditions. Conclusions explore the potential of reorienting geographic understandings of illicit practices within the mainstream economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In production and operation activities, some enterprises' capacity can not make up for market demand. To meet customer needs, overtime is one of the most common measures taken by enterprises. In this restricted situation, a combination strategy of overtime and subcontracting is introduced to improve the production. When orders occur, the vendor offers a credit time to the buyer, and it is assumed that daily demand is an exponential function of credit time. In this paper, a two-echelon supply chain with overtime and subcontracting under a trade credit policy is studied when limited production capacity exists. The main objective of this paper is to determine the buyer's optimal ordering quantity and the vendor's optimal overtime and subcontracting strategies with an optimal credit period, which minimize the costs of an independent decision model and an integrated model, respectively. Adequate numerical examples and sensitivity analysis are presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework. The conclusions show that inefficient overtime satisfies low demand under limited production capacity and that the vendor turns to subcontractors when demand grows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilising Bacchi's framework 'What's the problem represented to be?' the literature on managing academic workloads was analysed to explore why workload allocation models are deemed essential in the contemporary university and the assumptions which underpin workload allocations. Whether due to the need for efficient use of scarce resources or ensuring equity for staff, workload allocation models are promoted as an accurate measure of each individual's workload and as a measure of accountability. The literature privileges the views of staff whose workloads are 'managed' but unable to do their work within their contracted hours. Universities justify long hours of unpaid overtime as a norm of professionalism. Critical issues for managers are identified, and suggestions to enable them to be more effective in the process of workload allocation are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major challenge in maintenance scheduling is how to avoid excessive maintenance costs due to labor and overtime. In maintenance of utilities in commercial buildings, the repair technicians have to travel between the maintenance sites to perform maintenance tasks under non-preemption constraint. In such a maintenance, and due to geographically distributed assets in occupied buildings, travelling will consume a proportion of the available work time. To find a good balance between the number of technicians, the number of selected tasks and the right routing between the tasks along with overtime considerations, a MILP model is presented in this study. Here, joint decisions that will minimize the cost of labor, transportation and overtime in the form of time schedules and daily routes are addressed. Using AMPL and CPLEX to formulate and solve the model, case studies from real industry in Uae have been solved for testing and validation. The results showed a remarkable reduction in costs due to presenting optimal technician routes, low use of overtime and small workforces. The model can be cast into a commercial package, which offers maintenance providers a custom solution for maintenance activities that are characterized by their high frequency, short duration and spatially distributed sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies focus on explaining how militaries adapt in different ways to the challenges of war. However, organisation theory suggests that competition and normative pressure will lead overtime to convergence within particular business and policy sectors, as optimal ways of organizing and operating are learned and emulated. I examine this dynamic in the context of the conflict between the Afghan Taliban and the British Army. That there should be convergence in modes of operation or organizational form between these two very different opponents seems most improbable. Yet, as this article shows, convergence did occur as the conflict wore on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several working time characteristics have been linked to negative outcomes for health personnel. The aim was to investigate the impact of working time dimensions on well-being in a representative sample of physicians. Data was collected during a baseline study. Linear regression analysis was performed on a sample including 669 physicians of different medical specialties. The questionnaire included sociodemographic characteristics and information on working time dimensions (e.g. shift work). In addition, job satisfaction, workload and self-reported health were explored. The majority were female, working in internal medicine and the mean age was 42.5 years. Findings reveal that overtime hours (β = −0.478, p =.011) and autonomy (β = 0.444, p <.001) were significantly associated with job satisfaction. The number of free weekends (β = −2.622, p =.005) and autonomy significantly predicted personal (β = −6.153, p <.001), work-related (β = −6.597, p <.001) and patient-related workload (β = −4.731, p <.001). Overall health was only affected by working time autonomy (β = 3.804, p <.001). In conclusion, the study suggests that working time characteristics have negative consequences for well-being and need to be addressed to ensure health, performance and safety of physicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A canon, from the Greek for model, is a body of principles, rules, standards, or norms that is, at least to some degree, regarded as normative by a society, a discipline, or professionals in the area of endeavor to which it applies. This 'body' may be more or less coherent and it may include rules that are implicitly embedded in practices as well as explicitly expressed in formal standards and guides. Furthermore, the term canon is typically reserved for conventions that are respected on an ongoing basis, though they may undergo some modifications or interpretations over time. On the topic of records authenticity, one confronts different canons, depending on the context in which the authenticity is addressed. Beginning with a basic, empirical consideration of what an authentic record is, this article explores the canons on authenticity in jurisprudence, diplomatics and archival science, and considers both how they have evolved and how they need to evolve to be meaningful and effective for digital records. The issue of effectiveness is addressed from both an intellectual and practical perspective. Are there clear and adequate principles, standards or norms for ensuring and verifying the authenticity of digital records and preserving it overtime so that it can be proven and attested to throughout their life? If there are, can they be implemented in diverse digital environments? Candidates that could form the basis of a cannon for digital record authenticity are considered and both their promise and shortcomings identified. The final section of this article addresses the empirical question of whether there is a current canon for records authenticity that is generally accepted and applied by records and archival professionals. A survey designed to test whether the results of major research initiatives on the means of establishing and protecting authenticity have become part of the canon for the practice and beliefs of records and archival professionals reveals a significant disconnect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The condition of any system deteriorates overtime due to usage, environmental effect and aging. Preventive maintenance is often conducted to restore the system's condition and to prevent failures. Preventive maintenance activities are usually imperfect, meaning that the system failure rate increases with the increase in the number of repairs being carried out. Monitoring the time between failures can help in deciding whether further maintenance is beneficial or is no longer effective. In this paper, we introduce a Time Between Events chart for monitoring the failure events of imperfect maintained Weibull distributed system. We study the performance of the chart various performance measures. We provide an illustrative example using a dataset from the literature and an extensive case study from a painting shop, where a robotic system is operated. Further, we introduce a reliability scheme for monitoring the process where the application of the developed chart is elaborated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ending of a protest is a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of the dramaturgy of politics. Retrospectively, a movement's ending is what allows for an evaluation of what it has achieved. In this way, how a movement ends correlates, sometimes obliquely, with its ends. In this paper, we ask how a performance analysis of endings might help us re-evaluate protest and its afterlife. We examine three protest movements that ended in different ways: the sharp decline of the summit-hopping global justice protests of 1999 to 2001, the repression of the Istanbul protests against sexual violence of 2019 and the late afterlives of the Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s. Each offers a different way of reading the relationship between the ends of a movement and its ending. From the heighted affective terrain of what Alain Badiou describes as "the intense time of the riot" to the subtler time of subterranean movements, our analysis of the ends of these movements aims to discover ways to build social movements that might sustain themselves overtime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although considerable research has focused on the relationship between working hours and stress, few cross-cultural studies have examined this relationship with job control. This study investigated how job control relates to working overtime and stress with work centrality and organizational constraints in the United States and South Korea. Survey data collected from 787 employees from these two countries were analyzed using a multi-group path analysis. In the path model, job control was not related to overtime in either country but job control significantly related to stress in Korea. In the Korean sample only, job control significantly moderated the relationships of overtime with work centrality and organizational constraints and the relationships of stress with perceived overtime and organizational constraints. This study highlights the different effects of job control on overtime by culture, which has not been previously emphasized in western research. It also demonstrates the importance of job control on employee stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across the globe, extreme weather events have brought climate change into people's daily lives. Extended heatwaves, droughts, and wildfires are now recurring in many regions across the globe. This study asks how the exceptional 2018 summer influenced climate change beliefs among Swedish citizens. More specifically, the study looks deeper into belief formation dynamics under intense, consonant, and extended news reporting – addressing one of the most fundamental media effects in the literature: the over-time maintenance of societal beliefs through cumulative and repetitive exposure to a dominant issue frame. Using a unique three-wave panel survey, the analysis focuses on citizens' acceptance (and resistance) of the dominant climate change frame provided by traditional media – whether citizens believe in the existence, causes, and consequences of climate change. The findings reveal strong support for belief maintenance effects over time, but also that belief changes are possible. Even in situations of intense and consonant news reporting, acceptance (and resistance) of the dominant climate change frame depends on citizens' personal media orientations. Both trust in traditional news media and usage of alternative online news emerge as key factors conditioning classic media effects in a fragmented and polarized media environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the evolution of Vietnam–China relations in the post-Cold War to identify the factors that shapes its dynamics. It finds that the bilateral relations have been significantly changed overtime, from strategic antagonism to ideology-shared partnership and subsequently from economic sistership to security rivalry. The two countries' worldviews have gradually diverged. Given geographical nearness is a constant, such a course is driven by the interactions of four factours, including shifts in security environment, internal factional politics, economic calculations, and rising nationalism. At different points of time, some factor rises dominantly and these others matter less. However, it is observed that since the normalization in 1991 shared ideology figured less and less significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines officer losses during the first three months of Operation Barbarossa. It uses original, never-published German officer casualty data extracted and statistically analyzed from 13 by-name reports prepared by the Army Group Center Adjutant for Officer Personnel (IIa) during the summer of 1941. The list, comprising 7,644 names, proposes a periodization of the first phase of Operation Barbarossa in the Army Group Center zone of operations and presents an innovative perspective that uses the rise and fall of officer casualties as a one-of-a-kind measure of combat intensity. In other words, periods of differing casualty rates are seen as discrete operational phases when equated to neighboring intervals. To make the losses comparable across time, the article proposes the concept of division-days, which, in a manner similar to man-hours, records effective activity of these units in daily intervals. The casualty rate compared to total number of division-days is a measure of intensity. The analysis indicates that although there are three operational periods, two later phases see higher odds for officer losses, indicating intensified combat. In addition, the article considers several under-studied aspects of operational military history. First, it analyzes the distribution of casualties across divisions as a function of their posture (attack, defense, movement, reserve). The article further reveals that battle posture does not always follow the precept that 'movement is the best defense'. In fact, overall analysis shows that units maneuvering (attack and move) were more likely to lose officers than those stationary (defend and reserve). Overall, the article is a first attempt to judge the nature and intensity of Barbarossa as a function of complex, over-time data, broken down by types of unit and posture, revealing how dear the officer casualty toll was for the Germans, setting the tone for a long and ultimately unwinnable war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we address the main aspects shaping the profile of creative women in Spain. The creativity concept is based on Richard Florida's approach that takes into account the type of occupation in which women develop their work activities. From this occupational-based approach we define a list of creative jobs and characterize the types of these jobs in which creative women mainly carry out their activities. We have been able to observe over time that economic crisis has not significantly affected the group of creative women. Moreover, from a geographical dimension, empirical results show strong evidence for Florida's hypotheses on the relationships between presence of female creative class and variables such as tolerance, urbanity, amenities or innovation in Spanish regions. Our findings also suggest that most creative cities have greater income inequality. We finally estimate a logistic model by using microdata from the Labour Force Survey, which allows us to characterize the profile of creative women according to a series of socio-demographic and labour variables. We concluded that highly educated and Spanish women who are self-employer or working in services, as well as overtime, are more likely to have a creative occupation than the rest of female workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do alliance commitments affect US military spending? This question is at the heart of debates about the value of alliances and the future of US grand strategy. One perspective, which we call the budget hawk view, asserts that alliances are exorbitantly expensive, as they require military investments to deter third-party adversaries and reassure allies, encourage free riding, and facilitate reckless allied behavior. A competing view, which we label the bargain hunter perspective, claims that US alliance commitments are relatively cheap and might even reduce military spending. Allies provide key military capabilities, reassurance and extended deterrence are cheaper than they might initially seem, and alliances reduce the need for costly military interventions by promoting peace. Despite the importance of this debate, few studies have attempted to determine how alliance commitments affect US military spending. We use over-time variation in the number of US alliance commitments to estimate their financial toll. A statistical model of US defense expenditures from 1947 to 2019 shows that one new alliance commitment has a large positive association with defense budget levels in subsequent years. Military alliances benefit the United States in many ways but, consistent with the budget hawk view, they are expensive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on play-by-play statistics of 10 NBA seasons, we identify players who are personally responsible for the overtime by taking the last shot of the game. Players who miss the shot when the game is tied (crucial failure), perform better in overtime than in the last quarter but not significantly differently to their game and season averages. Players who score the equalizer (crucial success), perform substantially worse in overtime compared to the last quarter as well as compared to their game and season averages. We discuss psychological explanations and argue that our findings can to some extent be transferred to behavior in team production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the process of learning, performing, and recording Babbitt's Post-Partitions (1966), as well as Overtime (1987) and other Babbitt works, in the U.S. and in Japan. Issues discussed include: learning away from the instrument, pedalling, voicing, and body movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study deals with the balancing problem of a manual mixed-model assembly line, where the production volume or the product mix changes from shift to shift during the planning horizon. The unstable demand can be characterised by several representative scenarios, and the line uses overtime work to meet the demand variation. The balancing problem concerns how to assign assembly tasks to stations and determine the amount of overtime in each possible demand scenario. The objective is to satisfy the demand in each possible scenario with the minimum labour costs paid for both normal shifts and overtime work. A lower bound on the labour costs is proposed, and a heuristic algorithm is developed to quickly find a feasible solution. A branch, bound and remember (BB&R) algorithm is then proposed to find better solutions. These solution methods are tested on 765 instances. The BB&R algorithm obtains optimal solutions for 510 instances and gives high-quality solutions for the remaining 255 instances within 60 s. The experimental results show that the use of overtime work and adjustable cycle times significantly reduces the labour costs, especially when the demand or task processing time variations are large. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ice hockey is a high-intensity contact sport that places athletes at an elevated risk for injury relative to other sports. The purpose of the current study was to analyze factors contributing to fatigue and decreased recovery time and their associations with injury incidence among professional athletes in the National Hockey League (NHL). A retrospective review of all injuries suffered by NHL athletes during six consecutive seasons from 2013 to 2019 was performed. Team schedules were analyzed to assess (1) the number of instances with games on consecutive calendar days, (2) the number of overtime games, and (3) the number of overtime games within three calendar days of a previous overtime game. A Spearman's rank correlation coefficient was calculated from this data to assess the association between these factors and injury rates. In total, 4886 injuries were suffered by NHL players during the period of study, with the 2013–2014 regular season highest injury rate per 1000 athletic exposures (15.8). The lower body was the most frequently injured body area (25.0% of all injuries), followed by injuries to the upper body (23.7%). In an analysis of the number of overtime games and games on consecutive days and their relationships to injury rate, only overtime games within three calendar days and total injuries were found to have a significant association (ρ = 0.19, p = 0.01). The weak positive correlation between the number of overtime games within threedays of a previous overtime game and total injuries in professional ice hockey players suggests that overtime games played within a short period of time place athletes at increased risk for injury. Further studies are necessary to address this on an athlete-by-athlete level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating reports of missing children is a major source of demand for the police in the UK. Repeat disappearances are common, can indicate underlying vulnerabilities and have been linked with various forms of exploitation and abuse. Inspired by research on repeat victimisation, this paper examines the prevalence and temporal patterns of repeat missing episodes by children, as well as the characteristics of those involved. Using data on all missing children incidents recorded by one UK police service in 2015 (n = 3352), we find that: (a) 75% of missing incidents involving children were repeats, i.e. attributed to children who had already been reported missing in 2015; (b) a small proportion of repeatedly missing children (n = 59; 4%) accounted for almost a third of all missing children incidents (n = 952, 28%); (c) over half of all first repeat disappearances occurred within four weeks of an initial police recorded missing episode; and (d) children recorded as missing ten times or more over the one year study period were significantly more likely than those recorded missing once to be teenagers, in the care system or to have drug and/or alcohol dependencies. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for future research and the prevention of repeat disappearances by children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lockdowns imposed worldwide to curb the coronavirus diseases (COVID-19) spread has positive effects on the environment. However, it is unclear what fraction is caused by weather and what is related to lockdown. Here we used Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) height anomaly time series to quantify the spatio-temporal characteristics of lockdown-induced noise anomalies at 231 selected sites over mainland China. The results indicated that apparent declines (0.52 mm) in noise in 6 days (24–29 January 2020) after the lockdown in Wuhan resulted in drastically reduced human activities, which accounts for 71% of the total noise decrease. The lockdown effects persisted for 8 weeks and reached the maximum in the third week (6–12 February 2020) with reduced GNSS noise anomalies occurring at 81% of the GNSS sites. With the control of pandemic, increased noise anomalies occurred at more than 60% of the sites during the 9th week, which correlated well with the easing of lockdown in many cities in China. We concluded that this study provides new insights to quantifying the effects of human activities on geodetic measurements during the COVID-19 lockdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long working hours have been shown to negatively impact adverse events in health care. In this study, a retrospective correlational design was used to evaluate the relationship between working hours and near-miss medication error alerts. During a two-year period, 5372 nurses triggered 420,706 near-miss alerts on 9, 285, 786 medication administrations. Nurses who worked 60 h or more in a week yielded an average near-miss rate of 4.0% compared to 3.0% (p <.001) for nurses who did not. Nurses working extended hours had a significantly increased risk of triggering a near-miss alert compared to those not working extended hours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction and objective: With the world's older population continuing to grow, andropause (male menopause or late-onset hypogonadism) is considered as one of the most important issues of this era. In this study, we aimed to assess the effect of andropause health education on the level of knowledge and attitude of retired men.Methods: This controlled trial was conducted on 80 retired men (40 in intervention group, 40 in control group), who had been employed by the Department of Education, Shiraz, Iran. Data collection tool was a 38-item questionnaire, designed by the researcher, on participants' knowledge and attitude about andropause. Data were analyzed using SPSS software, version 22 and statistical tests such as independent and paired t tests were used.Findings: There was no significant difference between the intervention and control groups before the intervention. There was a significant difference in knowledge and attitude scores in each group immediately and 1 month after the intervention. The mean score of knowledge in the intervention group increased from 2.92 ± 1.68 before to 16.22 ± 1.34 after the intervention, and the attitude score increased from 14.9 ± 1.08 to 28.52 ± 1.44. Comparison of the two groups and repeated score analysis showed that there was a significant difference between the two groups over the time (p < .001).Conclusion: Educational intervention improved the knowledge and attitude of retired men toward andropause, which can have a positive impact on the timely recognition and proper treatment of the complications of andropause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: EMS professionals frequently work more than a standard 40-hour work week. For some EMS professionals, working overtime or multiple jobs may be necessary to make ends meet. Our objective was to evaluate the association between job satisfaction, intention to leave EMS, and financial dependence on overtime or working multiple jobs. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of nationally-certified EMS professionals who completed an online questionnaire after submitting their recertification application (22,626/101,363, response rate = 22%) between October 2017 – May 2018. Items included dependence on additional work, satisfaction with job, and intentions of leaving the profession. Multivariable logistic regression models were used to describe the association between dependence on additional work, and job satisfaction and intention to leave EMS within 1 year and 5 years, controlling for age, sex, minority status, agency type, employment status, and urbanicity. Results: A total of 18,285 respondents were included in the analysis. The majority of EMS professionals (75%) worked over 40 hours per week. Most respondents (71%) were dependent on overtime or multiple jobs to make ends meet. Those who were dependent on extra work had higher odds of being dissatisfied with their job (aOR 1.92, 95% CI:1.64–2.44, and higher odds of intentions to leave EMS within 1 year and 5 years respectively (aOR 1.32, 95%CI:1.14–1.54; aOR 1.16, 95%CI:1.07–1.25). Conclusion: Many EMS professionals depend on additional work to make a living. Financial dependence was associated with increased odds of workforce-reducing factors, including job satisfaction and intention of leaving. This can lead to poor individual outcomes such as stress and burnout, as well as to turnover within the workforce, thus reducing the number of individuals available to provide high quality emergency care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we build on and extend Gartner and Kolisch (2014)'s hospital-wide patient scheduling problem. Their contribution margin maximising model decides on the patients' discharge date and therefore the length of stay. Decisions such as the allocation of scarce hospital resources along the clinical pathways are taken. Our extensions which are modeled as a mathematical program include admission decisions and flexible patient-to-specialty assignments to account for multi-morbid patients. Another flexibility extension is that one out of multiple surgical teams can be assigned to each patient. Furthermore, we consider overtime availability of human resources such as residents and nurses. Finally, we include these extensions in the rolling-horizon approach and account for lognormal distributed recovery times and remaining resource capacity for elective patients. Our computational study on real-world instances reveals that, if overtime flexibility is allowed, up to 5% increase in contribution margin can be achieved by reducing length of stay by up to 30%. At the same time, allowing for overtime can reduce waiting times by up to 33%. Our model can be applied in and generalised towards other patient scheduling problems, for example in cancer care where patients may follow defined cancer pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a model in which endogenous growth arises in competitive markets. Knowledge is described as a factor used directly in the final goods' production. Firms demand both basic nonrival knowledge contents, which are supplied jointly and inelastically with raw labor, and further contents supplied by patent holders. This fact, together with Lindahl prices for knowledge, allows competition to work, while it also implies that workers' income share declines overtime. In a first version of the model with constant cost of knowledge production, the first best is attained. In a further version of the model, in which the cost of knowledge production is allowed to change over time and thus intertemporal externalities arise, in a decentralized economy a second best equilibrium occurs in the transitional period, while in the long run there is convergence to efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through ethnographic materials gathered from participant observation and interviewing in and beyond corporate contexts in Shanghai, this paper shows how a culture of overtime work was sustained and legitimated in urban China and how white-collar workers endured, rationalized, and accommodated it. In particular, I discuss forms of managerial control imposed on white-collar workers and social control prevalent in the workplace, to shed light on the formation of a kind of corporate governmentality in urban China and its implications for shaping the personhood of workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tenancy relationships in Nigeria are largely regulated by statutes. Most of the provisions of these statutes to lawyers and other stakeholders are susceptible to inconsistent interpretations. In recent times, the courts in Nigeria have taken steps to look beyond the law books and give flesh to areas in tenancy matters where there seem to be inadequacies in the provisions of the laws. In doing this, the courts have come up with some legal principles that the relevant statutes do not explicitly provide for, but arguably flow from the provisions of such statutes – a good example being the principle that a tenant who contests ownership with the landlord loses right to statutory notice to quit. Terms such as 'landlord' and 'tenant' are not as simple as they appear, especially considering the statutory definitions given to them by some of the tenancy statutes in Nigeria – particular attention is given in this regard to Tenancy Law of Lagos State 2011. This paper considers the intricacies of the definition of and relationship between the landlord and the tenant as provided in statutes and as interpreted by overtime by courts in Nigeria. The paper analyses the nature of the relationship between the landlord and the tenant as may be conceived and disambiguates the scope of law of a landlord and tenant relationship in Nigeria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we consider the problem of improving the Master Production Schedule (MPS) in make-to-order production systems when demand exceeds available resource capacity. Due to the complexity of the problem, in practice solutions are usually obtained manually. We propose an algorithm that offsets production orders guided by tardiness, earliness and overtime penalties. The intermediate tool used to determine resource utilization is Rough Cut Capacity Planning (RCCP) extended by positive lead times and options for overtime, earliness and tardiness. This approach leads to a more realistic resource loading calculation, similar to CRP but without its computational burden. The discrete optimization model is solved by a Genetic Algorithm (GA); within the GA, delays or early deliveries of each order are represented as genes of a chromosome. The method is tested against systematically developed benchmark problems and real industrial data. Improvements over the traditional RCCP procedure and an ERP's embedded routines are demonstrated by the computational results and support the applicability of the proposed approach for real-life make-to-order environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The degree to which simple policies for varying the length of each workday can affect job shop performance was investigated. The performance of a job shop operating on a fixed 8-hour day schedule was compared with a job shop that had some flexibility to vary an employee's workday by compensating hours in excess of an 8-hour day with an equivalent amount of time off. Thus, each flexible workday policy maintains an average workday of 8 hours/day for each employee. We simulated a hypothetical job shop to assess the effects of various environmental factors and workday policies on measures of interest to management and labour. We found significant improvement in job flow time with overtime (and time off) as little as an average of 24 min for every 8 hours of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Production quotas smooth production in order to synchronize inter-plant production networks. To meet quotas, plants work overtime whenever they're behind. In addition to this 'mandatory' overtime required to satisfy the quota of finished product at the end of the line, many plants run selected stations within the plant overtime to fill critical buffers within the plant. We call this intra-plant overtime 'preventive' overtime because by spending a little overtime this shift on critical stations, the plant can avoid massive overtime next shift. We describe this real production control problem currently facing industry. The problem arises because of (often underestimated or ignored) production variability. We exhibit actual production data that shows the degree of variability often inherent in current manufacturing processes. We describe four policies and compare them using simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Manufacturers use production quotas to smooth and synchronize production. We use a Markov chain to quantify the effect of quota flexibility on overtime and inventory costs. This quantification allows us to trade off these costs to find the optimal amount of quota flexibility. We define quota flexibility as the permitted amount and duration of deviations from the cumulative quota. We specifically analyse the cost savings as a function of the maximum allowed deviation amount from the cumulative quota for four policies. These example policies are the four permutations of two factors: whether or not backlogging is permitted; and whether or not actual production and the quota must be reconciled weekly. We apply the model to three automotive assembly plants and conclude that permitting modest flexibility in production quotas (of <1 h of production) significantly reduces total cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops a complex simulation model (written in GPSS) that comprises a range of different shop management decision areas such as job sequencing, overtime usage, machine speed variations and alternate machine selection. A suboptimal scheduling procedure is proposed which takes into account trade-offs between machining and delay cost on one hand, and computer time on the other hand. The efficiency of the heuristic is studied by means of model assumptions referring to real-world characteristics in the engineering industry environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A deterministic simulation study of a complex machine shop consisting of 69 work centres is presented. The purpose of the simulation study was to develop a planning tool to evaluate effects on overtime, work centre bottlenecks, in-process inventory buildup, delivery delays and other output variables caused by individual part delays of different load mixes, modifications in work centre capacities, installation of more automated machinery, and modification in scheduling rules.
The simulation programme and the machine shop it models are described. It was found that the developed simulation programme can be used as a useful planning tool for evaluating short-term and intermediate-term alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies an integrated decision problem on assigning and sequencing tasks to service providers. By considering the uncertain available time of the service providers, a stochastic programming model is proposed on the basis of a finite set of scenarios. Some realistic factors are also taken into account and formulated as some non-linear cost functions, which are linearised in this study. Moreover, a heuristic solution method is designed for solving some extremely large-scale problem cases within a reasonable period of time. Numerical experiments are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model and the efficiency of the proposed solution method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has been widely applied to sports, not many studies are related to basketball. Two types of approaches have been developed to measure the efficiency in basketball so far: those focused on the assessment of players and those that assess the performance of the teams. Assuming that the number of points scored in a basketball game greatly influences the appeal of a game, in this paper, a new approach focused on the measurement of the scoring efficiency of the two teams that play a game is addressed. To do that, the performance of each team in each quarter and the carry-overs between successive quarters must be taken into account. This leads to a Dynamic Network DEA model with two subprocess (corresponding to the home and visitor teams) running in each quarter. A scoring efficiency can be computed for each team in each quarter as well as for each team overall, for each quarter overall and for the whole game. The proposed approach is applied to the matches played during the 2014-2015 NBA season. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]