GENDER AND ATTITUDES TOWARD PROFESSIONAL ETHICS

This study was designed to examine the influence of gender and age on attitudes toward professional ethics among a sample of the Nigeria police officers. Using a cross-sectional survey, data was collected from a total of 163 participants. Results revealed that gender and age were significant predictors of unethical beliefs; female and older police participants were also more ethical than their male and younger counterparts. These findings were discussed in the context of socialization theory, Gilligan's moral development theory and other organisational practices, while its practical implications for the recruitment, selection and placement in the Nigeria police were also emphasized.     

A Doctrine without Dogma

ABSTRACT

In No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security Policy, Thomas M. Nichols calls for a constructive rethinking about the history of nuclear weapons and the attitudes that have grown up around them. Despite dramatic reductions since the end of the Cold War, the United States still maintains a robust nuclear triad that far exceeds the needs of realistic deterrence in the twenty-first century. Nichols advocates a new strategy of minimum deterrence that includes deep unilateral reductions to the US nuclear arsenal, a no-first-use pledge, withdrawing US tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, and ending extended nuclear deterrence for allies. The weakest part of his argument eschews nuclear retaliation against small nuclear states that attack the United States, opting instead to use only conventional weapons to guarantee regime change. He admits this will entail enormous cost and sacrifice, but cites the “immorality” of retaliating against a smaller power with few targets worthy of nuclear weaponry, which totally ignores the massive underground facilities constructed to shield military facilities in many of these states. Despite this, Nichols's thoughtful approach to post-Cold War deterrence deserves thoughtful consideration.     

Generalized orienteering problem with resource dependent rewards

We introduce a generalized orienteering problem (OP) where, as usual, a vehicle is routed from a prescribed start node, through a directed network, to a prescribed destination node, collecting rewards at each node visited, to maximize the total reward along the path. In our generalization, transit on arcs in the network and reward collection at nodes both consume a variable amount of the same limited resource. We exploit this resource trade‐off through a specialized branch‐and‐bound algorithm that relies on partial path relaxation problems that often yield tight bounds and lead to substantial pruning in the enumeration tree. We present the smuggler search problem (SSP) as an important real‐world application of our generalized OP. Numerical results show that our algorithm applied to the SSP outperforms standard mixed‐integer nonlinear programming solvers for moderate to large problem instances. We demonstrate model enhancements that allow practitioners to represent realistic search planning scenarios by accounting for multiple heterogeneous searchers and complex smuggler motion. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2013     

Maritime interdiction in Sri Lanka's counterinsurgency

A comprehensive maritime interdiction strategy to attack the insurgent's logistic system was a key element in the defeat of the Tamil Tigers. The campaign of maritime interdiction required the Sri Lankan Navy (SLN) to attack LTTE arms smuggling, sea piracy, and maritime terrorism. The SLN degraded the insurgency's robust maritime logistical network while also devising tactics to engage the maritime insurgents who reacted with swarm and suicide boat tactics. The efforts of the SLN forced the Tamil Tigers to confront the government's final land offensives with diminished resources, thus collapsing a three decades’ old insurgency in a matter of months.     

On valuing appreciating human assets in services

This paper derives optimal policies for when to hire, train, and lay off employees in service organizations when worker productivity appreciates deterministically or stochastically under constant, monotonic, and cyclic service demand. The model, an extension of the machine replacement problem from the engineering economy literature, uses infinite horizon linear programming to produce optimal personnel planning strategies and dual prices that characterize the workforce's economic value. The effect of employee attrition is also considered. In its valuation of human assets, unlike pure accounting approaches that only try to measure, this paper proposes an approach to capture the interaction between firm decisions pertaining to human resources and human resource value. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007     

Exact algorithms for integrated facility location and production planning problems

We consider a class of facility location problems with a time dimension, which requires assigning every customer to a supply facility in each of a finite number of periods. Each facility must meet all assigned customer demand in every period at a minimum cost via its production and inventory decisions. We provide exact branch‐and‐price algorithms for this class of problems and several important variants. The corresponding pricing problem takes the form of an interesting class of production planning and order selection problems. This problem class requires selecting a set of orders that maximizes profit, defined as the revenue from selected orders minus production‐planning‐related costs incurred in fulfilling the selected orders. We provide polynomial‐time dynamic programming algorithms for this class of pricing problems, as well as for generalizations thereof. Computational testing indicates the advantage of our branch‐and‐price algorithm over various approaches that use commercial software packages. These tests also highlight the significant cost savings possible from integrating location with production and inventory decisions and demonstrate that the problem is rather insensitive to forecast errors associated with the demand streams. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2011