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While the current financial crisis is widely acknowledged to be global, surprisingly little attention has been paid to its effect on one of the largest players in the global economy. China has weathered the crisis extremely well, though its growth has slowed slightly. I will analyze this by looking at China's purchases of debt, the Chinese holdings of debt in the United States and its growing holdings in Europe, and the policy decisions directing this. This shows an intriguing change in the policy decisions that led to China becoming such a large holder of American debt. China amassed its large holdings of debt from the United States by merit of the strong trade relationship between the two countries, as well as the stability of the U.S. dollar. However, China's interest in buying up Italian debt and forming stronger bonds with other Eurozone and European countries seems to speak to a different motive. Rather than allowing its reserves of foreign capital to grow over time, as it did with its U.S. debt, China is making a more aggressive move in this case. Thanks to its relative stability during the crisis, I believe this shows us that China is seeking to both ensure the continued security of its economic growth and increase its economic influence, thus using the instability of the global financial crisis to kill two birds with one stone.

Essential elements such as copper and manganese may demonstrate U‐shaped exposure‐response relationships due to toxic responses occurring as a result of both excess and deficiency. Previous work on a copper toxicity database employed CatReg, a software program for categorical regression developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, to model copper excess and deficiency exposure‐response relationships separately. This analysis involved the use of a severity scoring system to place diverse toxic responses on a common severity scale, thereby allowing their inclusion in the same CatReg model. In this article, we present methods for simultaneously fitting excess and deficiency data in the form of a single U‐shaped exposure‐response curve, the minimum of which occurs at the exposure level that minimizes the probability of an adverse outcome due to either excess or deficiency (or both). We also present a closed‐form expression for the point at which the exposure‐response curves for excess and deficiency cross, corresponding to the exposure level at which the risk of an adverse outcome due to excess is equal to that for deficiency. The application of these methods is illustrated using the same copper toxicity database noted above. The use of these methods permits the analysis of all available exposure‐response data from multiple studies expressing multiple endpoints due to both excess and deficiency. The exposure level corresponding to the minimum of this U‐shaped curve, and the confidence limits around this exposure level, may be useful in establishing an acceptable range of exposures that minimize the overall risk associated with the agent of interest.

AbstractFor large multibranch institutions such as banks, knowing the unit labour costs of services is essential for effective planning and control. This requires accurate information on the amount of time spent by employees carrying out various tasks. The literature on work measurement identifies two main approaches for establishing unit labour costs: work standards and work sampling. Although work standards indicate how much time employees should spend on various tasks under ideal conditions, statistical sampling methods employed in work sampling determine how much time is actually spent on these tasks in their natural settings. Work sampling can be extremely expensive, since exceedingly large sample sizes are required to accurately determine the costs of functions requiring small proportions of personnel time. Thus, we propose a hybrid methodology that combines survey sampling with the work standards approach.RésuméDans les grands établissements à succursales multiples comme les banques, il est essentiel de connaǐtre le coǔt unitaires de la main‐d'oeuvre qui dispense les services, afin que la planification et le contrǒle soient efficaces. Cette connaisance requiert des données précises sur le temps que passent les employés à effectuer diverses tǎch‐es. Pour établir le coǔt unitaire de la main‐d'oeuvre, la documentation scientifique sur la mesure du travail fait état de deux approches: le travail normatif et l'échan‐tillonage du travail. Bien que le travail normatif corre‐sponde au temps qu'un employé devrait consacrer aux diverses tǎches, les techniques statistiques d'échantil‐lonnage mesurent le temps réel mis à les accomplir en milieu de travail. L'échantillonnage du travail peut toutefois s'avérer très coǔteux, étant donné la taille des échantillons nécessaire pour déterminer avec précision le coǔt de fonctions ne nécessitant qu'une infime partie du temps de travail. Par conséquent, nous proposons une méthodologie hybride qui combine les deux approches: l'échantillonnage du travail et le travail normatif.

AbstractA number of investigators have explored the use of value of information (VOI) analysis to evaluate alternative information collection procedures in diverse decision‐making contexts. This paper presents an analytic framework for determining the value of toxicity information used in risk‐based decision making. The framework is specifically designed to explore the trade‐offs between cost, timeliness, and uncertainty reduction associated with different toxicity‐testing methodologies. The use of the proposed framework is demonstrated by two illustrative applications which, although based on simplified assumptions, show the insights that can be obtained through the use of VOI analysis. Specifically, these results suggest that timeliness of information collection has a significant impact on estimates of the VOI of chemical toxicity tests, even in the presence of smaller reductions in uncertainty. The framework introduces the concept of the expected value of delayed sample information, as an extension to the usual expected value of sample information, to accommodate the reductions in value resulting from delayed decision making. Our analysis also suggests that lower cost and higher throughput testing also may be beneficial in terms of public health benefits by increasing the number of substances that can be evaluated within a given budget. When the relative value is expressed in terms of return‐on‐investment per testing strategy, the differences can be substantial.