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Intensive traffic often occurs in web‐enabled business processes hosted by travel industry and government portals. An extreme case for intensive traffic is flash crowd situations when the number of web users spike within a short time due to unexpected events caused by political unrest or extreme weather conditions. As a result, the servers hosting these business processes can no longer handle overwhelming service requests. To alleviate this problem, process engineers usually analyze audit trail data collected from the application server and reengineer their business processes to withstand unexpected surge in the visitors. However, such analysis can only reveal the performance of the application server from the internal perspective. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

This paper proposes an approach for analyzing key performance indicators of traffic intensive web‐enabled business processes from audit trail data, web server logs, and stress testing logs.

The key performance indicators identified in the study's approach can be used to understand the behavior of traffic intensive web‐enabled business processes and the underlying factors that affect the stability of the web server.

The proposed analysis also provides an internal as well as an external view of the performance. Moreover, the calculated key performance indicators can be used by the process engineers for locating potential bottlenecks, reengineering business processes, and implementing contingency measures for traffic intensive situations.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

This article draws on longitudinal research into the establishment of co‐principalships. It discusses this innovative approach to school management in relation to women’s negotiations of their motivations, aspirations and strategies for career advancement and work/life balance. Longitudinal case studies of three primary school co‐principal initiatives were carried out between 1995 and 2000. Repeat interviews and observations with co‐principals, board chairpersons and school staff were conducted. Interviews were also undertaken with parents; students; and representatives of state education agencies, national governing boards, principals’ associations and teacher unions, alongside analysis of school and state policy documents. The resulting case study narratives described how each co‐principalship was initiated and either established or dis‐established. A discourse analysis of these narratives then examined how links between discourse, knowledge and power were being negotiated and challenged, as the new subject position of “co‐principal” was being constructed in New Zealand. This article analyses the significance of the similarities and differences in the women’s career backgrounds, motivations and strategies for moving into management positions. As they initiated their co‐principalships, the women variously went “against the grain” and/or co‐opted elements of the new public management corporate executive model for school leadership, which was introduced within the radical state restructuring during the late 1980s and early 90s in New Zealand.

Every year a number of employees are dismissed in American companies. Several names have been used to call these circumstances such as dismissal, separation, termination, discharge, firing, or layoff (Paula, 1985). Most people use these words interchangeably even though they are slightly different in the meaning regarding the cause of unemployment. The purpose of this study is to show the distinction between “termination” and “layoff” including the definition, the cause of termination and lay off, and the strategy to handle both the termination and layoff situation more properly and effectively. In addition, the study will demonstrate how the layoff has an impact on the American Corporation.

Efficiency and quality are recognized as key components of business strategies. The concepts of efficiency, while armed with the capabilities of quality, help organizations attain service effectiveness and excellence. Today’s organizations need to manage continuous improvements and breakthroughs in quality that meet customer requirements and expectations. This paper presents the findings of a recent empirical study conducted in The Salisbury YMCA of Hong Kong. The study investigated various attributes of service quality and identified ten elements that might promote quality culture change and encourage organizational‐wide commitment and involvement. The findings contribute to the development of a service excellence approach that helps identify customer requirements and secure performance improvement in restaurant operations.

Presents a special issue, enlisting the help of the author’s students and colleagues, focusing on age, sex, colour and disability discrimination in America. Breaks the evidence down into manageable chunks, covering: age discrimination in the workplace; discrimination against African‐Americans; sex discrimination in the workplace; same sex sexual harassment; how to investigate and prove disability discrimination; sexual harassment in the military; when the main US job‐discrimination law applies to small companies; how to investigate and prove racial discrimination; developments concerning race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; developments concerning discrimination against workers with HIV or AIDS; developments concerning discrimination based on refusal of family care leave; developments concerning discrimination against gay or lesbian employees; developments concerning discrimination based on colour; how to investigate and prove discrimination concerning based on colour; developments concerning the Equal Pay Act; using statistics in employment discrimination cases; race discrimination in the workplace; developments concerning gender discrimination in the workplace; discrimination in Japanese organizations in America; discrimination in the entertainment industry; discrimination in the utility industry; understanding and effectively managing national origin discrimination; how to investigate and prove hiring discrimination based on colour; and, finally, how to investigate sexual harassment in the workplace.

This article attempts to examine the impact that traditional island cultural events have on tourism development in some of the West Indian (Commonwealth Caribbean) islands, how national tourist boards and hotels use these mega‐events for promotional purposes, how these cultural events are looked upon by the tourists themselves, and the possible dilution of the basic traditions and cultures of the territories if they are abused for tourist gain only.

Fieldwork is one of the hallmarks of anthropology. Almost all students of anthropology have geographical and cultural specializations, ranging from a small group to a nation. Their interest areas are often identified or marked by real or putative boundaries; and it is within these boundaries that anthropologists have “founded” their own villages and tribes — “my village”, “my tribe.”

Considers the factors which influence Taiwanese decisions to buy Japanese or US refrigerators, basing the conclusions on the results of a survey of 586 respondents drawn from Taiwan’s four largest cities – Taipei, Kaoshiung, Taichung and Tainan. Describes how the questionnaires were constructed and pretested, and explains how the data was recorded (using a 5‐point Likert‐type scale) and analysed (using factor analysis and t‐tests). Tests particularly for cultural values of the Chinese, consumer ethnocentrism, openness to foreign culture, country image, and consumer sophistication. Finds that, despite the longer presence of Japanese goods in Taiwan, Japan’s proximity to Taiwan, and more cultural similarities between the Japanese and Taiwanese, Taiwanese consumers rate the USA’s country image factor higher than Japan’s, with consequent implications regarding intention to buy US goods. Recommends that US marketers build on their advantageous country image when they promote US appliances in foreign markets. Cautions against making too much of this snapshot data but concedes that further research into different foreign markets, different appliances, and with a longitudinal approach, would ascertain if findings are consistent with this survey, which has obvious benefits as new markets, such as China and India, open up to western goods and appliances.