Groups are and always will be essential to human life. Our primal ancestors protected themselves from dangerous animals, human enemies, and natural disasters by joining together in groups. Teams of workers in ancient civilizations combined their efforts to build dams, irrigation systems, and colossal monuments. Merchants and craftspeople formed guilds to organize business practices as early as ...

In this paper, we present a formal model of group discussion dyanmics. An understanding of the face-to-face communications in a group discussion can provide new clues about how humans collaborate to accomplish complex tasks and how the collaboration protocols can be learned. It can also help us to evaluate and facilitate brainstorming sessions. We will discuss the following three findings about...

The various forms of Internet groups share many similarities to groups that exist in the offline world, but there are also critical differences. The authors examine traditional definitions of groups and how Internet groups fit into those existing definitions. They provide an analysis of relevant aspects that make virtual groups similar to and different from nonelectronic groups, and they examin...

The CERN SPS was the first accelerator to store and collide hadron bunches protons and antiprotons in counter rotating beams. A relatively small number of bunches circulated in a single vacuum chamber, inside normal conducting magnets. Now used mainly as an injector to LEP, the SPS will become the final accelerator in the injection chain supplying the LHC with protons and, at least occasionally...

An imp ortant aspect of the problem-based and project-organised study at Aalborg University is the supervision of the project groups. At the basic education (first year), it is stated in the curriculum that part of the supervisors’ job is to deal with group dynamics. This is due to the experience that many students are having difficulties with practical issues such as collaboration, communicati...

Successful projects represent the effective culmination of management skills, planning, and individual project member strengths. In operations management, such strengths are often viewed predominantly from the perspective of skill base. However, it has become increasingly evident that behavioral traits associated with individuals play a very significant, if not ultimately dominating, role in th...