Changing the climate [organisational culture for lean manufacturing]

Failure to realize the full benefits of world-class performance can often be attributed to aspects of organizational culture. Many organizations are now looking forward implementing lean manufacturing techniques. However, the employees on whom lean manufacturing is inflicted often frustrates its implementation. Many organizations overlook the importance of organizational culture in the successful implementation of lean manufacturing. It is worth knowing that in order to implement lean, it is vital to understand the culture of the said organization in order to create a cost-effective implementation plan. This paper describes the finding of a study conducted within one organization regarding the implementation of lean manufacturing.     

Prototyping Bubba, a highly parallel database system

Bubba is a highly parallel computer system for data-intensive applications. The basis of the Bubba design is a scalable shared-nothing architecture which can scale up to thousands of nodes. Data are declustered across the nodes (i.e. horizontally partitioned via hashing or range partitioning) and operations are executed at those nodes containing relevant data. In this way, parallelism can be exploited within individual transactions as well as among multiple concurrent transactions to improve throughput and response times for data-intensive applications. The current Bubba prototype runs on a commercial 40-node multicomputer and includes a parallelizing compiler, distributed transaction management, object management, and a customized version of Unix. The current prototype is described and the major design decisions that went into its construction are discussed. The lessons learned from this prototype and its predecessors are presented     

Many voices, many selves.

Reviews the book, Invisible guests: The development of imaginal dialogues by Mary Watkins (see record 1986-98003-000). Watkins seeks to convince the reader that the dialogues we carry on silently—"with our reflection in the mirror...with a figure from a dream or movie, with our dog...with critics, with our mothers, with our god(s)..."—are not an incidental aspect of mental life but central phenomena, laden with both cognitive and emotional significance. Agreement with this beginning point commits the reader to two further ideas which are conceptually independent but systematically interwoven in this book: that the imaginative life deserves analysis based on appreciation of its centrality and generative nature, and that dialogue is a fundamental—perhaps the primary—form in which we think. Watkins draws upon a range of sources in psychology, philosophy, literature and religion to develop an integrated and original interpretation of the meanings of imaginal dialogue in mental life. Readers may take issue with one or another theme, or with Watkins' overall approach, but they will find themselves engaged in a meaningful and thought-provoking dialogue. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A closed-chest canine model for cross-sectional echocardiographic study

Cross-sectional echocardiography has been limited in the intact dog due to the intervening lobes of the left lung. Previous echo studies of the canine heart have utilized implanted transducers, catheter-tip transducers, or opened-chest preparations. The pericardial cradle technique described in this paper provides an acoustical window for echo studies of the entire heart in the closed-chest dog that has several advantages over these prior preparations. The left lung was retained by attaching the pericardium to the thoracic wall in a simple prestudy operation. Cross-sectional real-time echocardiographic studies have been performed on 52 anesthetized animals that were prepared in this manner. The studies were video taped for frame-by-frame analysis.     

Back-scattered electron imaging for leakage analysis of four retrofilling materials

This study aimed to evaluate, ex vivo, the nanoleakage in dentinal tubules, the linear infiltration of silver nitrate in the dentin wall/root-end filling material interface, and the presence of gaps in this interface in root-end cavities filled with 4 filling materials. Forty-eight disto-buccal root canals of maxillary molars were instrumented and filled. Retrograde cavities were prepared with ultrasonic points (apical 2 mm). The samples were divided into 2 control groups (n = 4) and 4 experimental groups (n = 10): Group I--white mineral trioxide aggregate (MTA); Group II--Super EBA; Group III--Portland cement; and Group IV--Sealer 26. After 1 week, the specimens were subjected to silver nitrate and prepared for SEM (backscattered electrons). In the apical-apical segment, an area with significantly higher leakage was observed for Super EBA, followed by Portland cement, MTA, and Sealer 26 (P = 0.0054). In the medium and cervical segments, all materials showed the same leakage behavior (P = 0.1815 and P = 0.1723, respectively). The linear infiltration at the dentin wall/root-end filling material interface was higher with Super EBA than the other groups. No differences in the percentage of gaps along the 3 mm of dentin wall/root-end filling material interface between the 4 materials were evident (P > 0.05). Nanoleakage occurred mainly in the apical segment of the samples, and Super EBA showed the highest values. The area and linear leakage were lower in the middle and coronal segments, regardless of the root-end filling material. No material perfectly sealed the root-end cavities, which allowed for the leakage occurrence.     

Optimal tuning widths in population coding of periodic variables

We study the relationship between the accuracy of a large neuronal population in encoding periodic sensory stimuli and the width of the tuning curves of individual neurons in the population. By using general simple models of population activity, we show that when considering one or two periodic stimulus features, a narrow tuning width provides better population encoding accuracy. When encoding more than two periodic stimulus features, the information conveyed by the population is instead maximal for finite values of the tuning width. These optimal values are only weakly dependent on model parameters and are similar to the width of tuning to orientation or motion direction of real visual cortical neurons. A very large tuning width leads to poor encoding accuracy, whatever the number of stimulus features encoded. Thus, optimal coding of periodic stimuli is different from that of nonperiodic stimuli, which, as shown in previous studies, would require infinitely large tuning widths when coding more than two stimulus features.