Task Assignment

This paper studies gender differences in the allocation of workers across jobs of different complexity using panel data on Finnish metalworkers. These data provide a measure for the complexity of the workers' tasks that can be used to construct a complexity ladder of jobs. We study whether women have to meet higher productivity requirements than men in order to be assigned to more complex tasks. Gender differences in the promotion rates are examined. We use productivity measures that are based on the supervisors' performance evaluations and examine gender differences in the productivity of promoted and non-promoted workers. It is found that women start their careers in less complex tasks than men and that they are also less likely to get promoted than men who start in similar tasks. When we compare the productivity of men and women, both at the initial assignment and when some of these individuals have been promoted, we find that there is no gender-related productivity diffe...

In this paper, we are concerned with alternative formulations of the vehicle-task assignment problem in the presence of the uncertainty. Uncertainty arises due to sensing errors, poor intelligence or incorrect information in data. Military applications such as intelligence, surveillance, planning and scheduling, etc, involve decision making in dynamic, distributed, and uncertain environments.

This research aims feature the behavioral/cognitive psychology and to identify well-know psychology instruments and list used instruments in the sample. Participated this study 35 psychologists by various brazilian states. The material used in this study has two parts. The first comprised questions about professional acting, therapistic choose, professional activity, strategy and instruments used in the assessment. The second part constitute a setoff psychological assessment instruments and the task assigned to subjects was to check know and used. Results indicated the most of professional are acting in university, they used assessment with to aim diagnosis and intervention and they use psychology instruments, of which theoretical foundation is not in accordance with the therapistic choose.

The Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent Control, a fleet of quadrotor helicopters, has been developed as a testbed for novel algorithms that enable autonomous operation of aerial vehicles. The testbed has been used to validate multiple algorithms such as reactive collision avoidance, collision avoidance through Nash Bargaining, path planning, cooperative search and aggressive maneuvering. This article briefly describes the algorithms presented and provides references for a more in-depth formulation, and the accompanying movie shows the demonstration of the algorithms on the testbed.

The paper presents a performance model that can be used to optimally schedule arbitrary tasks on a network of heterogeneous computers when there is an upper bound on the size of the task that can be solved by each computer. We formulate a problem of partitioning of an n-element set over p heterogeneous processors using this advanced performance model and give its efficient solution of the complexity O(p3 × log2 n).

Our study suggests that (a) there are universal sex differences in the behavior of children 3–11 years of age, but the differences are not consistent nor as great as the studies of American and Western European children would suggest; (b) socialization pressure in the form of task assignment and the associated frequency of interaction with different categories of individuals—i.e., infants, adults, and peers—may well explain many of these differences; (c) aggression, perhaps especially rough and tumble play, and touching behavior seem the best candidates for biophysical genesis; (d) all of the behaviors that are characteristic of males and females seem remarkably malleable under the impact of socialization pressures, which seem to be remarkably consistent from one society to another; and (e) the difference in many of the types of behavior seems to be one of style rather than intent: i.e., seeking help (“feminine”) rather than attention (“masculine”), and justifying dominance by appealing to the rules (“feminine”) rather than straight egoistic dominance (“masculine”).Although our findings do not speak for adolescent and adult male and female behavior, they should caution the social scientists and animal ethologists who are interested in possible evolutionary and survival theories not to underestimate the effect of learning environments. These learning environments may well be responsible for the behavior frequently attributed to the innate characteristics of male and female primates as inherited by their human descendants.

Efforts to increase access to life-saving treatment, including antiretroviral therapy (ART), for people living with HIV/AIDS in resource-limited settings has been the growing focus of international efforts. One of the greatest challenges to scaling up will be the limited supply of adequately trained human resources for health, including doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other skilled providers. As national treatment programmes are planned, better estimates of human resource needs and improved approaches to assessing the impact of different staffing models are critically needed. However there have been few systematic assessments of staffing patterns in existing programmes or of the estimates being used in planning larger programmes. We reviewed the published literature and selected plans and scaling-up proposals, interviewed experts and collected data on staffing patterns at existing treatment sites through a structured survey and site visits. We found a wide range of staffing pattern...

The methodology involved in deriving the Hubble Constant via the calibration of the corrected peak luminosities of Type Ia supernovae (SNe) is reviewed. We first present a re-analysis of the Calan-Tololo (C-T) and Center for Astrophysics (CfA) Type Ia SN surveys. Bivariate linear least squares and quadratic boot-strapped fits in peak apparent magnitude and light curve shape are employed to correct this heterogeneous sample of peak apparent magnitudes, resulting in an homogeneous (and excellent) secondary distance indicator: the so-called corrected peak luminosity. We next provide an empirical calibration for this corrected luminosity, using Cepheid-based distances for seven nearby spiral galaxies host to Type Ia SNe. Included in this sample is the spectroscopically peculiar SN 1991T (in NGC 4527), whose corrected peak luminosity is shown to be indistinguishable from that of so-called ``normal'' SNe. A robust value of the Hubble Constant is derived and shown to be H0=73+/-2(r)+/-7(s) km/s/Mpc.

The majority of writing tasks assigned to second language (L2) learners tend to target an abstract audience and the writing generated is not meant for real or meaningful purposes. The emergence of Web 2.0 concepts has created a potential educational environment where students have access to a widely distributed, authentic audience with a simple click of the mouse. This study

The task assignment problem is one of assigning tasks of a parallel program among the processors of a distributed computing system in order to reduce the job turnaround time and to increase the throughput of the system. Since the task assignment problem is known to be NP-complete except in a few special situations, satisfactory suboptimal solutions obtainable in a reasonable amount of computation time are generally sought. In the paper we introduce a technique based on the problem-space genetic algorithm (PSGA) for the static task assignment problem in both homogeneous and heterogeneous distributed computing systems to reduce the task turnaround time and to increase the throughput of the system by properly balancing the load and reducing the interprocessor communication time among processors. The PSGA based approach combines the power of genetic algorithms, a global search method, with a simple and fast problem-specific heuristic to search a large solution space efficiently and effectively to find the best possible solution in an acceptable CPU time. Experimental results on test examples from the literature show considerable improvements in both the assignment cost and the CPU times over the previous work. The proposed scheme is also applied to a digital signal processing (DSP) system consisting of 119 tasks to illustrate its balancing properties and computational advantage on a large system. The proposed scheme offers 12–30% improvement in the assignment cost as compared to the previous best known results for the DSP example.

Organizations of agents based on Virtual Organizations needs to be supported by a coordinated effort that explicitly determines how the agents should be organized and carry out the actions and tasks assigned to them. The interactions of a multi-agent system cannot be only related to the agent and the communication skills, but also to the concepts of organizational engineering. Moreover, nowadays there is a clear trend towards using methods and tools that can help to develop and simulate virtual organizations by means of multiagent systems (MAS). Simulation is used for several purposes ranging from work flow to system's procedures representation. The contribution from agent based computing to the field of computer simulation mediated by ABS (Agent Based Simulation) is a new paradigm for the simulation of complex systems that require a high level of interaction between the entities of the system. The main goal of this work is a new global coordination model for an agent organizat...

Large distributed grid systems pose new challenges in job scheduling due to complex workload characteristics and system characteristics. Due to the numerous parameters that must be considered and the complex interactions that can occur between different resource allocation policies, analytical modeling of system behavior appears impractical. Thus, we have developed the GangSim simulator to support studies of scheduling strategies in grid environments, with a particular focus on investigations of the ...