The empowerment of service workers: what, why, how, and when

In recent years, businesses have rushed to adopt an empowerment approach to service delivery in which employees face customers "free of rulebooks," encouraged to do whatever is necessary to satisfy them. But that approach may not be right for everyone. Bowen and Lawler look at the benefits and costs of empowering employees, the range of management practices that empower employees to varying degrees, and key business characteristics that affect the choice of approaches. Managers need to make sure that there is a good fit between their organizational needs and their approach to frontline employees.     

The what, why and how of mechatronics

This article provides an introduction to the basic concepts of mechatronics. It considers the impact of mechatronics on the process of product design and development and sets out a framework within which the underlying technical and organisational requirements associated with a mechatronic approach to system design and development can be successfully deployed     

The renaissance of home hemodialysis: where we are, why we got here, what is happening in the United States and elsewhere

Home hemodialysis has been around since 1964, but its use has declined over the years in most countries, this despite its advantages, particularly improved patient survival and quality of life and significant cost savings. Experience has shown that home hemodialysis can be performed successfully by many more patients than at present. Recently, with the demonstration of even better results with more frequent hemodialysis that is obviously best performed at home and with the development of new, more patient-friendly machines, the use of home hemodialysis is beginning to increase again.     

Geopolymers and other alkali activated materials: why,how, and what?

This paper presents a review of alkali-activation technology, moving from the atomic scale and chemical reaction path modelling, towards macroscopic observables such as strength and durability of alkali-activated concretes. These properties and length scales are intrinsically interlinked, and so the chemistry of both low-calcium (‘geopolymer’) and high-calcium (blast furnace slag-derived) alkali-activated binders can be used as a starting point from which certain engineering properties may be discussed and explained. These types of materials differ in chemistry, binder properties, chemical structure and microstructure, and this leads to the specific material properties of each type of binder. The secondary binder products formed during alkali-activation (zeolites in low-Ca systems, mostly layered double hydroxides in alkali-activated slags) are of significant importance in determining the final properties of the materials, particularly in the context of durability. The production of highly durable concretes must remain the fundamental aim of research and development in the area of alkali-activation. However, to enable the term ‘highly durable’ to be defined in a satisfactory way, the underlying mechanisms of degradation—which are not always the same for alkali-activated binders as for Portland cement-based binders, and cannot always be tested in precisely the same ways—need to be further analysed and understood. The process of reviewing a topic such as this will inevitably raise just as many questions as answers, and it is the intention of this paper to present both, in appropriate context.     

Editors of medical journals: Who and from where

The representation of scientists from different countries in the editorial boards of the most influential journals from 48 fields of biomedical and clinical research was studied. Scientists from the USA were best represented, followed by scientists from the UK, FRG, Switzerland, Japan, Sweden, Canada, The Netherlands and Italy. The scientifically most productive countries provided most of the editors. For Dutch editors a strong correlation was found between the number of editorships held and the number of papers authored or measures of scientific eminence. Conceivably, scientific productivity and eminence may be important reasons for being asked as an editor. However, national biases play a role too in the composition of editorial boards.     

Who’s who and what’s what in Brazilian Public Health Sciences

Introduction  The present study endeavours to provide information on what are the research interests of Brazilian Public Health and how authors can be ranked. Methods  Post-graduate faculty members ISI data are analysed according to regions. Number of paper and its citations, papers’ type-complexity-cooperation, Bradford’s Law, Shannon’s indexes, time dynamic functions, Lotka’s Law, and ranking functions are examined. Results  Current production was built up in the last 30 years at a rate of 9.6% articles/year and 12.6% citations/year. 66% of potential authors were present in ISI data records, 64% achieved at least one citation. Research fields do not much depart from the traditional PH purview. More than 66% of authors have just one paper and decrease is steep. Subtle differences call attention to the South region. Conclusion  Brazilian PH is mainly committed to classical research fields and ranking among authors is narrow.     

Who is driving when unrestrained children and teenagers are hurt?

This paper examines driver characteristics in crashes where child and teenage motor vehicle crash victims were injured, in particular factors that determine whether or not the victim was restrained. Analyzing the data on children and teenagers who are injured revealed that the presence of a second adult in a vehicle increased the likelihood that these passengers were unrestrained. Other findings are more predictable: victim restraint use generally mirrored driver restraint use; a male driver, a young driver, a drinking driver, a speeding or reckless driver, an unlicenced or suspended driver, and a night-time trip each independently raised the odds that child and teenage passengers were not restrained when they were injured.     

Depicting communities of Romani studies: on the who,when and where of Roma related scientific publications

Scientometrics - Contemporary research on Roma from diverse disciplines has grown strongly during the last years. This is the first bibliometric study on the field of Romani studies considering the...     

Using the when/where rules in dual resource constrained systems for a hybrid push-pull control

This paper proposes a production control system, DRC-HPP, which uses the when/where rules in dual resource constrained (DRC) systems for a hybrid push-pull (HPP) control, to overcome some difficulties in modelling/implementing DRC/Kanban systems. These rules and the novel ‘process-or-transport’ and ‘whereto’ rules are embedded in some policies workers use to decide when to process (transport) parts, and where (whereto). Unlike most control systems, in which a group of workers is always responsible for transporting and another group is always responsible for processing parts, workers in DRC-HPP are responsible for both transporting and processing parts, as in the Toyota Sewn Products Management System (TSS). Yet, unlike TSS, DRC-HPP can be applied in any layout type. Workers transport parts when they are idle in part processing to enhance their utilisations and synchronise transportation. Since the transportation does not require special worker skills, the cost of training workers is not incurred. DRC-HPP is compared with different benchmarks through simulation experiments to evaluate its performance. It performs well under relatively short transportation times with respect to processing times. If they are relatively longer, the issue becomes to determine the number of workers to achieve a performance level. DRC-HPP also facilitates bottleneck management.     

The application of bibliometric analyses in the evaluation of social science research. Who benefits from it, and why it is still feasible

Summary The paper discusses an application of bibliometric techniques in the social sciences. While the interest of policy makers is growing, the topic is getting more and more attention from bibliometricians. However, many efforts are put into developing tools to measure scientific output and impact outside the world of the Social Sciences Citation Index, while the use of the SSCI for bibliometric applications is covered with obscurity and myths. This study attempts to clarify some of the topics mentioned against the application of the SSCI for evaluation purposes. The study will cover topics like the existing publication and citation culture within the social sciences, the effect of variable citation windows, and the (geographical) origin of citation flows.     

O fly,where art thou?

In this paper, the design of a real-time image acquisition system for tracking the movement of Drosophila in three-dimensional space is presented. The system uses three calibrated and synchronized cameras to detect multiple flies and integrates the detected fly silhouettes to construct the three-dimensional visual hull models of each fly. We used an extended Kalman filter to estimate the state of each fly, given past positions from the reconstructed fly visual hulls. The results show that our approach constructs the three-dimensional visual hull of each fly from the detected image silhouettes and robustly tracks them at real-time rates. The system is suitable for a more detailed analysis of fly behaviour.     

Tell me why

Engineers usually do an excellent job of documenting WHAT they build--the plant drawings and specifications record in excruciating detail the materials of construction, temperature and pressure ratings, size of pipes and equipment, equipment layout, piping and equipment interconnections, and all other information required to construct and operate a plant. However, the design basis--the WHY of the plant design--often is not nearly so well documented. Understanding the design basis of the plant, particularly with regard to the safety features, devices, and procedures, is as important, or perhaps more important, than understanding the exact specifications of the equipment for the long term safe operation of the plant. Sometimes the reason for critical safety features, particularly inherently safer design features, may not be apparent to people who were not involved in the original design. These features may be vulnerable to compromise or elimination in future modifications of the plant. The people running the plant at the time the modifications are made no longer remember the original design basis. This can also work in the opposite sense-a plant may continue to accept and manage certain hazards long after the original reason for designing the plant to operate in that way has been eliminated, because it has "always been done that way". This important information about the safety design basis of a plant must be preserved by implementation of a process safety information management system. Several case studies and examples illustrating these points will be discussed.     

21st century screening experiments: What,why, and how

ABSTRACT

The primary aim of screening experiments is to identify the active factors; that is, those having the largest effects on the response of interest. Large factor effects can be either main effects, two-factor interactions (2FIs), or even strong curvature effects. Because the number of runs in a screening experiment is generally on the order of the number of factors, the designs rely heavily on the factor or effect sparsity assumption. That is, practitioners performing such experiments must be willing to assume that only a small fraction of the factors or effects are active.

Traditional screening designs such as regular fractional factorial and Plackett-Burman designs employ factors at two levels only. Though they have orthogonal linear main effects, such designs cannot uniquely identify factors with strong curvature effects.

Definitive screening designs (DSDs) have many desirable properties that make them appealing alternatives to other screening design methods. They are orthogonal for the main effects. In addition, main effects are orthogonal to all second-order effects and second-order effects are not confounded with each other. In addition, quadratic effects of every factor are estimable. For more than five factors, a DSD projects onto any three factors so that a full quadratic model in those three factors is estimable with reasonable efficiency. As a result, when three or fewer factors turn out to be important, follow-up optimization experiments may not be necessary.

All this begs the question, “Are DSDs really as good as they are advertised to be?” This article addresses this question with an even-handed comparison of the various screening approaches. It also considers the sparsity assumption common to all screening designs and provides some guidance for quantifying what effect sparsity means for both traditional screening designs and DSDs.     

谁决定你的行动

从2010年1月起,本刊推出"沙龙"栏目,每期由主持人提出一个主题,请数位嘉宾围绕该主题各抒己见,从不同角度阐释管理观点。本期"沙龙"栏目讨论行为动机。在有限的职业生涯中,每一个人都时刻面临着选择与被选择,究竟是什么决定着我们的行动?是心态?责任?金钱?还是名誉?本期沙龙邀请我国知名管理咨询公司——正略钧策管理咨询公司的两位管理顾问贾宏海和袁丽娜,请他们由一个经典管理案例延展开来,进行开放式的讨论。     

Who Are You?

During the first mid‐term examination (which occurred three to four weeks after the start of instruction), students from six lower division undergraduate courses at a major public university were asked if they could recall the name of their instructor. The 95 percent who were able to correctly write the first or last name of their instructor also scored significantly (P = 0.003) better on the examination than those who could not. The most widely reported methods for learning the instructor's name were the first lecture (52 percent), the syllabus (26 percent), and the university catalog (12 percent). Students were also asked if they thought that the professor knew the student's name. Four percent of the respondents reported that they thought the instructor knew their name, 89 percent replied that they did not think so, and six percent were not sure.     

设计者

在艺术设计体现出自己的独特个性，是每个设计者所追求的。在美国学习、教学和做设计的经历，使我掌握了如何寻找以及雕琢个性的方法。过程如同将自己缚于一点都不自由的茧中，然后才有破茧后掌握自由度的能力。     

Practicing what We Preach

• With the increasing globalisation of knowledge and management education, it is important that we build on our scanty understanding of trends and levels of geographic diversification in editorial board membership of management journals.
• Our study examines geographic diversity in editorial boards in Management over a 20-year period. It uses secondary data from 57 journals covering approximately 16,000 editorial board members.
• We found that the geographic diversity of editorial boards (EBs) has increased in the last 20 years, but it is still low for most management journals. Further, two factors partly predict the geographic diversity of EBs of management journals: the editor’s country of residence and the field of research.
• Continued active management by editors, professional associations and individual academics alike is necessary to ensure that our editorial boards properly reflect the diverse management community.