Scheduling approaches for conventional surgery operating rooms in a hospital treat surgeons as bottleneck resources directly, but do not deal with stochastic medical resources, leading to an uneven human resource distribution in optimizing medical resource scheduling. Thus, this research focuses on the dynamic configuration scheduling problem for stochastic medical resources. In this paper, the surgical operating room is limited, and the arriving calls (i.e., number of patients) are dynamic. When a patient arrives, the nurse anesthetist and anesthesiologist are limited, but the medical service duration per patient is random. We introduce the drum-buffer-rope (DBR) scheduling approach to analyze which types of medical resources become bottleneck resources for optimizing operating room scheduling. After verifying the effectiveness of the DBR method in uncertain situations, the Monte Carlo simulation is demonstrated.

Little is known about adolescent applications of the virtues such as honesty, responsibility and courage across different cultural contexts. Using the Adolescent Intermediate Concepts Measure we analyze samples of adolescents (ages 12 to 20; N ϭ 9,112) from 5 contexts: North Macedonia, Mexico, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Across samples, adolescents provide evidence of developmental growth in the ability to apply virtue concepts as assessed by responses to dilemma-based situations. Within these trends, participants found it easier to identify action choices that reflect the virtue concepts as compared to justifications for possible actions. Additionally, participants were better able to identify appropriate applications of the virtues as compared to inappropriate ones. Gender differences favoring females were noted across samples. Overall, similarities across settings were more striking than differences suggesting that there is value in viewing the virtues as a normative component of character development across the adolescent years.

We present a theory on how trust in the central government to remedy grievances combined with a lack of trust in local government to act motivates people to participate in local protests in China. Low trust in local government combined with high trust in the central government gives people expectation that protest will not be an exercise in futility. People protest to redress injustices when they believe that such protests have a chance of producing a favorable resolution of their grievances. Utilizing individual level data from the Asian Barometer Survey Wave 4, our analysis suggests that, in contemporary China, people who have greater trust in the central government than the local government are more likely than others to report having participated in protests. In a society without meaningful elections, participating in protest is an effective strategy for attracting the attention from the upper-level authorities in hope of redressing unfavorable situations.

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