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Due‐date performance (DDP) is a very important performance indicator for the companies. Thus, companies with a high hit rate would have greater competitive advantage; on the contrary, companies that delay customers' orders frequently would lose sales opportunities and reputations. Therefore, there were many academic studies and practical efforts to improve DDP in the past, but the problem of low hit rate still exists. In order to increase the hit rate, some companies have focused on reducing the variation, while others focus on production management, but is the real problem affecting the low rate variability or production management? This is indeed difficult to be validated through practice. Therefore, this study designed three scenarios, tested each scenario for 30 times, each test involved seven subjects. The tests were to provide counter‐evidence in the Job Shop environment without variation. If the variation is the main factor of affecting hit rate, the rate at this time should be good; otherwise, the assumption that variation is the main cause is rebutted. The results demonstrated that production management planning is the main cause, and the method of enhancing the hit rate is obtained during the test.

The current uptake of 4D planning in industry is slow and there is a need to demonstrate its value over traditional planning technologies. The aim of this research study is to develop a novel approach to establish the value of a 4D tool in the construction industry.

The exploratory research strategy draws on several social science research methods to collect information from human subjects. This exploratory research work has used literature review, open‐ended questionnaire, surveys, semi‐structured interviews and historical site records. These have been analysed in order to identify, develop and quantify 4D‐based key performance indicators.

The paper identifies and quantifies 4D‐based key performance indicators. Analysis of the planning efficiency (hit rate percentages) measure on three projects shows that, on an average, a 17 per cent increase in the average industry hit rate was achieved by the use of 4D technology. Also the quantification of communication efficiency measure has shown that on average 30 per cent of meeting time was saved by the use of 4D planning.

The complexity and rapidly paced development of today's projects are challenging the industry to find new innovative approaches to deliver projects. 4D is emerging as a construction‐planning technology to address some of these challenges. 4D planning has the potential to improve visualisation of building design and construction, but its implementation in the industry has yet to reach maturity. This technology enables clients, contractors, planners and sub‐contractors to visualise and understand design and scheduling issues at the early stages of the project.

American police trace their initial brush with handgun training to efforts taken by New York City in 1895. Developing proficiency did not become a widely held priority until beginning in the mid‐1920s when the reform era’s focus upon training understandably led them to desire being not just trained, but “qualified” with their handguns. Qualification is a military‐derived status introduced in large part by the National Rifle Association’s police firearms training programme between the two World Wars. Today, as then, formal qualification expectations imply that officers exceeding various minimum performance levels are competent to employ handguns during armed confrontations. An examination of police field marksmanship in armed confrontations ‐ within the context of firearms training developments, the nature of and role played by “qualification”, and the basis for threshold scores ‐ suggests otherwise.

The purpose of this paper is to apply signal detection theory (SDT) to the problem of detecting management fraud. The use of SDT methodology significantly strengthens understanding of the relationships among audit technology, base rates of management fraud, costs of Type I and Type II errors, extensions of audit procedures, and risk assessments prior and during the audit. The analysis suggests that the auditor must accept disproportionate false alarm rates in order to maintain audit effectiveness in the presence of management fraud. This condition becomes even stronger as the costs of Type II errors increase compared to costs of Type I errors. The study also provides policy implications for auditor practice and standard‐setters.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the effectiveness of systems for ensuring cooperation in online transactions is impacted by a positivity bias in the evaluation of the work that is produced. The presence of this bias can reduce the informativeness of the reputation system and negatively impact its ability to ensure quality.

This research combines survey and experimental methods, collecting data from 1,875 Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers in five studies designed to investigate the informativeness of the MTurk reputation system.

The findings demonstrate the presence of a positivity bias in evaluations of workers on MTurk, which leaves them undifferentiated, except at the extremity of the reputation system and by status markers.

Because MTurk workers self-select tasks, the findings are limited in that they may only be generalizable to those who are interested in research-related work. Further, the tasks used in this research are largely subjective in nature, which may decrease their sensitivity to differences in quality.

For researchers, the results suggest that requiring 99 per cent approval rates (rather than the previously advised 95 per cent) should be used to identify high-quality workers on MTurk.

The research provides insights into the design and use of reputation systems and demonstrates how design decisions can exacerbate the effect of naturally occurring biases in evaluations to reduce the utility of these systems.

Despite its benefits, the uptake of 4D planning in the construction industry is slow and therefore there is a need to demonstrate its value over traditional planning technologies. The aim of this paper is to develop a novel approach that demonstrates the value of 4D tools to the construction industry.

The research strategy utilised draws on several social science research methods. The data collection methods employed included a literature review, an open‐ended questionnaire, surveys, semi‐structured interviews and the analysis of historical site records. The data collected were analysed using qualitative and quantitative techniques in order to identify, develop and quantify 4D‐based key performance indicators.

This paper identifies and quantifies 4D‐based key performance indicators using case study analysis. In the case studies it was found that, on average, a 17 per cent increase in planning efficiency were achieved by the use of 4D technology, while the communication efficiency measure illustrated that, on average, a 30 per cent reduction in the time used for meetings was achieved by the use of 4D planning.

The complexity and rapid pace of development in today's construction projects are challenging the industry to find new innovative approaches to delivering projects. 4D tools are emerging as a construction planning technology that addresses some of these challenges. 4D planning has the potential to improve the visualisation of building design and construction, but its implementation in the industry has yet to reach maturity.

The paper highlights technology that enables clients, contractors, planners and sub‐contractors to visualise and understand design and scheduling issues at the early stages of a project.

In 1989–90, 32 percent of the searches of the electronic catalog at the Vanderbilt University Library yielded “no item found,” that is to say, the searches were “no hits.” More than one million searches were conducted on Vanderbilt's Acorn catalog and mainframe article index service, so more than 300,000 searches ended in “no hits.” Vanderbilt uses the popular NOTIS software for its catalog, but I suspect that other automated systems perform similarly. It would be naive to say that the library catalog is satisfying searchers 68 percent of the time. We need to think of strategies to help the library improve its performance by reducing the rate of “no hits.” When evaluating strategies we should also consider which ones might lower costs.

Purpose – Health information technology (HIT) holds promise for improving the quality of health care and reducing health care system inefficiencies. Numerous studies have examined HIT availability, specifically electronic health records (EHRs), and utilization among physicians in individual countries. However, no one has examined EHR use among physicians who train in one country and move to practice in another country. In the United States, physicians who complete medical school outside the country but practice within the United States are commonly referred to as International Medical Graduates (IMGs). IMGs have a growing presence in the United States, yet little is known about the availability and use of HIT among these physicians. The purpose of this study is to explore the availability and use of HIT among IMGs practicing in United States.

Design/methodology/approach – The Health Tracking Physician Survey (2008) was used to examine the relationship between availability and use of HIT and IMG status controlling for several physician and practice characteristics. Our analysis included responses from 4,720 physicians, 20.7% of whom were IMGs.

Findings – Using logistic regression, controlling for physician gender, specialty, years in practice, practice type, ownership status and geographical location, we found IMGs were significantly less likely to have a comprehensive EHR in their practices (OR=0.84; p=0.005). In addition, findings indicate that IMGs are more likely to have and use several so-called first generation HIT capabilities, such as reminders for clinicians about preventive services (OR=1.31; p=0.001) and other needed patient follow-up (OR=1.26; p=0.007).

Originality/value – This study draws attention to the need for further research regarding barriers to HIT adoption and use among IMGs.

This study aims to ensure the operation safety of high speed trains, it is necessary to carry out nondestructive monitoring of the tensile damage of the gearbox housing material in rail time, yet the traditional tests of mechanical property can hardly meet this requirement.

In this study the acoustic emission (AE) technology is applied in the tensile tests of the gearbox housing material of an high-speed rail (HSR) train, during which the acoustic signatures are acquired for parameter analysis. Afterward, the support vector machine (SVM) classifier is introduced to identify and classify the characteristic parameters extracted, on which basis the SVM is improved and the weighted support vector machine (WSVM) method is applied to effectively reduce the misidentification of the SVM classifier. Through the study of the law of relations between the characteristic values and the tensile life, a degradation model of the gearbox housing material amid tensile is built.

The results show that the growth rate of the logarithmic hit count of AE signals and that of logarithmic amplitude can well characterize the stage of the material tensile process, and the WSVM method can improve the classification accuracy of the imbalanced data to above 94%. The degradation model built can identify the damage occurred to the HSR gearbox housing material amid the tensile process and predict the service life remains.

The results of this study provide new concepts for the life prediction of tensile samples, and more further tests should be conducted to verify the conclusion of this research.

This paper aims to propose a scenario-based approach for measuring interest rate risks. Many regulatory capital standards in banking and insurance make use of similar approaches. The authors provide a theoretical justification and extensive backtesting of our approach.

The authors theoretically derive a scenario-based value-at-risk for interest rate risks based on a principal component analysis. The authors calibrate their approach based on the Nelson–Siegel model, which is modified to account for lower bounds for interest rates. The authors backtest the model outcomes against historical yield curve changes for a large number of generated asset–liability portfolios. In addition, the authors backtest the scenario-based value-at-risk against the stochastic model.

The backtesting results of the adjusted Nelson–Siegel model (accounting for a lower bound) are similar to those of the traditional Nelson–Siegel model. The suitability of the scenario-based value-at-risk can be substantially improved by allowing for correlation parameters in the aggregation of the scenario outcomes. Implementing those parameters is straightforward with the replacement of Pearson correlations by value-at-risk-implied tail correlations in situations where risk factors are not elliptically distributed.

The paper assumes deterministic cash flow patterns. The authors discuss the applicability of their approach, e.g. for insurance companies.

The authors’ approach can be used to better communicate interest rate risks using scenarios. Discussing risk measurement results with decision makers can help to backtest stochastic-term structure models.

The authors’ adjustment of the Nelson–Siegel model to account for lower bounds makes the model more useful in the current low-yield environment when unjustifiably high negative interest rates need to be avoided. The proposed scenario-based value-at-risk allows for a pragmatic measurement of interest rate risks, which nevertheless closely approximates the value-at-risk according to the stochastic model.