ABSTRACT: This study examines how different types of performance measures were weighted in a subjective balanced scorecard bonus plan adopted by a major financial services firm. Drawing upon economic and psychological studies on performance eval-uation and compensation criteria, we develop hypotheses regarding the weights placed on different types of measures. We find that the subjectivity in the scorecard plan allowed superiors to reduce the ‘‘balance’ ’ in bonus awards by placing most of the weight on financial measures, to incorporate factors other than the scorecard measures in performance evaluations, to change evaluation criteria from quarter to quarter, to ignore measures that were predictive of future financial performance, and to weight measures that were not predictive of desired results. This evidence suggests that psychology-based explanations may be equally or more relevant than economics-based explanations in explaining the firm’s measurement practices. The high level of subjectivity in the balanced scorecard plan led many branch managers to complain about favoritism in bonus awards and uncertainty in the criteria being used to determine rewards. The system ultimately was abandoned in favor of a formulaic bonus plan based solely on revenues.

The history of serological investigations of the blood of the insane is traced from the initial such study in 1854 by a solitary Scottish asylum physician, who counted the blood cells of his lunatic patients under a weak microscope, to the January 2005 announcement by an international team of geneticists of the development of a genomic blood test that can differentially diagnose schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The story of the first claim of the development of a blood test for madness in 1912 – the Abderhalden defensive ferments reaction test – is related in detail. Studies of the blood of the insane have followed four general methodological paradigms: the corpuscular richness paradigm (1854); the metabolic paradigm (c. 1895); the immunoserodiagnostic paradigm (1906); and the medical genomics paradigm (2005).

OATAO is an open access repository that collects the work of Toulouse researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible. Abstract We present first principle calculations of the structural, electronic, magnetic, vibrational and elastic properties of the k-Fe 3 AlC perovskite, within the ab initio formalisms of the Density Functional Theory (DFT) and the linear response theory of the DFT. These properties are compared with those of the intermetallic Fe 3 Al-L1 2 isostructural phase of k, permitting to interpret the role of the carbon element. We also discuss the influence of the spin effects (GGA and SGGA approaches) on the vibrational properties of some FeeAl intermetallics.

Corpus Linguistics is becoming an increasingly important part of language research; also interest in incorporating Corpus Linguistics into language teaching has become pronounced (cf. O’Keefe et al. 2007). Hoey (2005) has presented a theory that provides a set of rules that are possibly underpinning why Corpus Linguistics works as a way of analysing language: Lexical Priming. This theory can be seen as an explanation of why collocations exist. A listener will recognise a word more quickly when a related word is given (i.e. bodyheart). However, the theory is dependent on evidence of psycholinguistic and cognitive science claims. We cannot modify an approach to language description unless we are confident that we have sound evidence. Since Lexical Priming will have implications for how we deal with the results of computer-based language analysis, this article will show a range of arguments to support Lexical Priming as a linguistic theory and provide, to an extent, material to supplement Hoey’s 2005 book. 1

In the first of their two-part article on the British reaction to dementia