Kind Of Hierarchy Research Articles

Investigations Into More Exact Weightings of Customer Demands in QFD

Apart from the customer demands themselves, the weightings of the customer demands are one of the main input data of a QFD (Quality Function Deployment) and furthermore of the actual construction process of products. Up to now, most interviews with stakeholders have been carried out with questionnaires and then absolute weightings have been used. Now it has been analysed if the use of other interview and evaluation techniques, e.g. relative weightings and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), can improve the precision of the demands and wishes of the stakeholders. Now the task was to analyse if the use of relative weightings as input of a QFD is possible at all, how they have to be adapted and if an increase in precision compared to the use of absolute weightings is reached. When using AHP during the product development it has become clear that only up to seven demands can be rated at the same time by customers. That means that a kind of hierarchy has to be developed to correctly transfer the demands and their weightings into the QFD.

Der andere Orientalismus. Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination im 19. Jahrhundert

Reviewed by: Der andere Orientalismus. Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination im 19. Jahrhundert Kamakshi P. Murti Der andere Orientalismus. Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination im 19. Jahrhundert. Von Andrea Polaschegg. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005. xi + 613 Seiten + 33 s/w Abbildungen. €118,00. The title of Andrea Polaschegg's book, Der andere Orientalismus, is thought-provoking indeed. At first glance, it seems to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to nineteenth-century orientalists and their attempts to give a scientific rationale to the agenda of territorial aggrandizement—this reader had in her mind's eye the slightly altered title "The 'othered' Orientalism," and looked for what was seemingly the sub-text of the book, namely the writer's wish to demystify, with post-colonial theoretical underpinnings, the eternal return of the Orientalist who had armed himself this time around with the protest of being 'othered.' The title of the book, its table of contents, bibliography—all promised not only a thorough and critical re-reading of the literature, but also a constructive and insightful critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, which was the first text in a post-colonial world to question the nineteenth-century discipline of Orientalism and its avowal of a purely scientific, non-political agenda. Polaschegg begins by analyzing Said's Orientalism, using as the basis of her critique Sadik Jalal Al-Azm's assessment of Said. However, she leaves us with Al-Azm's rather predictable conclusion that no culture can penetrate another culture without distorting the latter by categorizing, classifying, schematizing, and finally reducing it to a comprehensible entity, leaving out her own response. She merely says: "Nun hat aber bereits Sadik Jalal Al-Azm [. . .] gezeigt, daß weder das Moment der 'Vereinnahmung' (d.i. die Wahrnehmung der fremden Kultur nach Maßgabe der vertrauten) noch der Abgrenzung der eigenen Kultur gegen die andere als spezifisch westlich oder 'kolonisierend' betrachtet werden können, sondern Verfahrensweisen sind, die allen Kulturen eignen" (48). Polaschegg does not talk about Al-Azm's assumption as ignoring the fact that a culture does not always 'reduce' another culture out of 'pure' intellectual curiosity. In discussing nineteenth-century "deutsch-morgenländische" imagination, [End Page 558] she ignores the historical-political specificities of that century, namely the imperialist-colonialist discursive framework within which most Orientalists functioned. She quotes both Said and Al-Azm, accusing the former of an ahistorical approach, and presenting Al-Azm's as a counter-argument, which itself obliterates any critical analysis of intercultural relations and the kinds of hierarchies they construct at certain moments in history. One would assume that in her extensive discussion of the "linguistic turn" (143ff.) Polaschegg would mention the political ramifications behind such an interest in comparative linguistics, the predecessor of which was, significantly enough, the field of comparative anatomy. However, the sheer weight of descriptive material presented obfuscates rather than clarifies the conditions under which Orientalism took a "linguistic" or other "turn." It was not coincidental that the discipline of comparative linguistics was established in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The age of discovery and colonization was accompanied by an obsessive search for one's national history. The British, Portuguese, and French colonial administrators discovered early on that Sanskrit provided them with the requisite knowledge to administer law in British India. They thus used the services of Europeans with a knowledge of Sanskrit (cf. Hammer-Purgstall, Rückert, Max Müller—to name some of the Germans) to provide translations of these texts as expediently as possible. In doing so, they also appealed to the search for origins, using the emotionally highly-charged issues of nation and nationalism that characterized the nineteenth century in Germany and elsewhere. German Sanskritists, who saw that Sanskrit as an originary language was even older than Greek and Latin, wanted to carve out for themselves a uniquely superior place in history. "Sanskrit knowledge presents itself to us as a major vehicle of the ideological form of social power in traditional India," says Sheldon Pollock ("Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj," Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, eds., Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania...

On the hierarchies of Δ20-real numbers

A real number x is called Δ 2 0 if its binary expansion corresponds to a Δ 2 0 -set of natural numbers. Such reals are just the limits of computable sequences of rational numbers and hence also called computably approximable. Depending on how fast the sequences converge, Δ 2 0 -reals have different levels of effectiveness. This leads to various hierarchies of Δ 2 0 reals. In this survey paper we summarize several recent developments related to such kind of hierarchies shown by the author and his collaborators.

Order-sorted logic programming with predicate hierarchy

Order-sorted logic has been formalized as first-order logic with sorted terms where sorts are ordered to build a hierarchy (called a sort-hierarchy). These sorted logics lead to useful expressions and inference methods for structural knowledge that ordinary first-order logic lacks. Nitta et al. pointed out that for legal reasoning a sort-hierarchy (or a sorted term) is not sufficient to describe structural knowledge for event assertions, which express facts caused at some particular time and place. The event assertions are represented by predicates with n arguments (i.e., n-ary predicates), and then a particular kind of hierarchy (called a predicate hierarchy) is built by a relationship among the predicates. To deal with such a predicate hierarchy, which is more intricate than a sort-hierarchy, Nitta et al. implemented a typed (sorted) logic programming language extended to include a hierarchy of verbal concepts (corresponding to predicates). However, the inference system lacks a theoretical foundation because its hierarchical expressions exceed the formalization of order-sorted logic. In this paper, we formalize a logic programming language with not only a sort-hierarchy but also a predicate hierarchy. This language can derive general and concrete expressions in the two kinds of hierarchies. For the hierarchical reasoning of predicates, we propose a manipulation of arguments in which surplus and missing arguments in derived predicates are eliminated and supplemented. As discussed by Allen, McDermott and Shoham in research on temporal logic and as applied by Nitta et al. to legal reasoning, if each predicate is interpreted as an event or action (not as a static property), then missing arguments should be supplemented by existential terms in the argument manipulation. Based on this, we develop a Horn clause resolution system extended to add inference rules of predicate hierarchies. With a semantic model restricted by interpreting a predicate hierarchy, the soundness and completeness of the Horn-clause resolution is proven.

Organizational Learning, Circularity and Double-Linking

In recent writings on organizational learning an interesting debate between proponents of team learning and those defending hierarchy as an essential condition for learning has developed. Here it is argued that teams appear to be the key learning units in organizations, but hierarchies are necessary to store and accumulate important learning results. Thus, in larger organizations teams must be integrated into some kind of hierarchy. Several authors have dealt with the problem of combining the benefits of both hierarchical and team-like structures. Attempts by Likert and Ackoff to combine the benefits of both hierarchical and team structures are based on the ideas of circularity and the (single) linking pin. A further elaboration of these solutions involves the idea of double-linking, as it is used in several Dutch organizations. Double-linking between teams provides the kind of vertical linkages which support and safeguard upward as well as downward information processing. As such, through the principle of double-linking organizations may become reflexive learning organizations.

Combinatorial structures and structures for classification

The problem of random generation of structures of classification, such as partitions or various kinds of hierarchies, is approached in two different ways. On the one hand, structures of classification are considered as particular combinatorial structures and then they can be randomly generated using the calculus introduced by Flajolet, Zimmermann and Van Cutsem (1993). On the other hand, some Markov or renewal process models can be introduced to describe some of these structures and can be used to generate such random structures, according to some ideas of Van Cutsem and Ycart (1993). Some asymptotics properties allow one to simplify the procedures. These last results are presented in the example of stratified hierarchies. It is clear that these techniques are mainly useful for the problem of the classifiability of data.

Confusion in philosophy: A comment on Williams (1992)

Patricia Williams made a number of claims concerning the methods and practise of cladistic analysis and classification. Her argument rests upon the distinction of two kinds of hierarchy: a ‘divisional hierarchy’ depicting ‘evolutionary’ descent and the Linnean hierarchy describing taxonomic groups in a classification. Williams goes on to outline five problems with cladistics that lead her to the conclusion that systematists should “eliminate cladism as a school of biological taxonomy and to replace it either with something that is philosophically coherent or to replace it with ‘pure’ methodology, untainted by theory” (Williams 1992, 151). Williams makes a number of points which she feels collectively add up to insurmountable problems for cladistics. We examine Williams' views concerning the ‘two hierarchies’ and consider what cladists currently understand about the status of ancestors. We will demonstrate that Williams has seriously misunderstood many modern commentators on this subject and all of her “five persistent problems” are derivable from this misunderstanding.

Hierarchical Selection and Fitness in Modular and Clonal Organisms

Modular growth generates at least three kinds of hierarchies: morphological, functional, and demographic. The morphological hierarchy corresponds to the phenotypic characters of both the units (modules) that are repeated by developmental processes, and the units (organisms, colonies, and clones) that develop by iteration, specialization and integration of modules. The functional hierarchy concerns the levels of interaction or, in evolutionary terms, the functional relationships between fitness and the phenotypic characters at different levels of modular organization. Finally, clonal growth and reproduction results in a nested hierarchy of demographic units that are replicated by asexual propagation. Each level of the demographic hierarchy that is characterized by specific birth and death rate, is a potential candidate for evaluating fitness. We propose a formal approach in order to analyze the hierarchical structure of phenotypic selection in modular organisms, and to evaluate the selective importance of various levels of modular organization. We derive a measure of selective importance from the sensitivity of fitness to a unit change in the characters of a given level: the sum of squared sensitivities associated with that level. We propose that clonal-level characters of disintegrated clones will make small contributions to the variation in fitness, while such characters will be more important if the clone is physically and physiologically integrated. Moreover, we present a decomposition of fitness variation in relation to the levels of trait variation. This decomposition demonstrates that the levels where variation in fitness is observed do not always correspond to the interaction-levels at which the causal agents of selection are acting on particular traits. Following the logic of phenotypic optimization models, we consider three examples of selection in order to examine whether the different demographic levels are equally suitable for evaluating fitness. In two examples of density-independent selection we show that the Malthusian parameter is identical at all levels in the hierarchy. However, the third example shows that this result is not valid in density-dependent selection models. The way density-dependent regulation is supposed to operate in the model system determines which of the demographic levels should be used to evaluate fitness. Consequently, there is no fundamental demographic level that should a priori be chosen when measuring fitness

Quark mass hierarchies from the universal seesaw mechanism.

The paper is an extension of the previous work based on the idea of a universal seesaw mechanism to explain the hierarchies in the fermion mass spectrum. A model is proposed within the framework of left-right symmetry with a minimal Higgs system and an axial U(1) symmetry imposed to distinguish the generations. Previous work was confined, for mathematical simplifications, to the case of nonsingular mass matrices. In the present paper, singular matrices are considered. A systematic perturbative technique is developed to display the mass eigenvalues in terms of the vacuum expectation values of the assumed Higgs multiplets. The model successfully correlates the mass hierarchies among the quarks to the assumed hierarchies in the vacuum expectation values without appealing to a hierarchy in the Yukawa-type fermion-Higgs-boson couplings. By considering a general Higgs potential appropriate to the model, we study its minimization and prove that there exists an open subdomain in the parameter space where the orbit of the lowest minima of the potential corresponds to the kind of hierarchy in the vacuum expectation values needed for the success of the model.

地域労働市場の階層性に関する一考察 「林業労務」型村落の事例から

In Japan, subcontract factories have been decentralized in mountain villages during the rapid economic growth period. As a result, it came to produce new labor demands, and the local labor market has shown a kind of hierarchical structure. One is the “first type” labor market by which new graduates are chiefly targeted, and the other is the “second type” which absorbs the middle and advanced age that lives in the mountain villages. Workers who belong to the former can be applied the seniority wage and the lifelong employment system, and acquire the income equivalent to urban workers. On the other hand, the latter exploit the unstable day laborers, who can be paid no more than the minimum wage. Such gaps in income level and employment status have impeded the autonomous development of mountain villages.Until now, many studies have been accumulated about this hierarchical structure of the local labor market. Many of them focused on the elucidation of a depopulation mechanism. However, investigations are comparatively few on the separated mountain villages, in which manufacturing industries are not located yet. Thus, the author chose the Nakatsugawa hamlet as a field, which is a typical “Forestry-based village” in the Chichibu area. And the following points were clarified as the result of my research in 1989.Firstly, it is remarkable that labor demand and supply are mostly closed in the village. This characteristic is still maintained by the isolated location and low settling (U-turn) rate of the young. And that promotes further population outflow.According to the gaps of income level and working conditions, the author can divide the employment structure of this hamlet into three classes. The first class workers can receive average wages in the Chichibu area, the second class can receive lower daily wages and the third class consist of the temporarily employed housewives receiving the lowest wages. Moreover, the first class is also higher than the other in terms of employment status.This is a commontende ncy in Japanese mountain villages. However, such a hierarchy does not so much reflect the academic background and the age in this hamlet, where new graduates seldom settle. The author can admit a regional trait in terms of job selection during the 1960-70's. Until the 1960's, it was the subcontract workers employed by the forestry office or the Chichibu Mine who get the highest wage in this hamlet. status and treat- remained as regular workers have consequently secured relatively high change to keep ment. On the other hand, who repeated temporal labor migration or job Among them, who their income level have been obliged unstable status as “implicitly contracted day laborer”It is still difficult to commute out of the village from this hamlet. Therefore, labor market of the “first type” is hardly formed. Though, it has turned out a kind of hierarchy appeared to the wage level and working conditions. This was so because central capitalists, who had entered there, enclosed the excellent workforce during 1960-70's.

The Play of Dance: An Introduction to "Lamb, Lamb, Lamb, Lamb, Lamb,..."

At 50, Deborah Hay is one of the few original postmodern choreographers still actively exploring an antitechnical aesthetic. While the likes of Trisha Brown, David Gordon, and Twyla Tharp have turned to increasingly virtuosic dancers and movement styles, Hay is still interested in the aesthetics of the lived-rather than the mastered-body. She still exists (both literally-in Austin, Texas-as well as metaphorically) at the margins of the art, refusing to buy into the conventional standards of beauty that have reentered the field in the last decade. She simply has eliminated that kind of hierarchy from her vocabulary. By calling 'dance' we are then making a judgment about stuff we are not calling 'dance.' I have an unquenchable thirst to present that area of movement not recognized as dance-to pull it back into the world of dance (I990). The choreographer's model remains John Cage, whose insistence that anything-including noise and silence-could be music, revolutionized the fate of late-twentieth-century art. Hay grew up in Brooklyn, feeding on the Rockettes and the New York City Ballet. She did indeed learn to well enough to join the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in I964, but soon quit that in favor of the avantgarde community of the Judson Dance Theatre. She discovered in its fondness for nontrained performers a whole new world of possibilities. She never took another class (it felt limiting); instead, she explored tai chi chuan, whose centered, grounded, smooth way of moving is still rec-

Integrated Process Knowledge Systems

In this paper, we study how tools from Artificial Intelligence Technology, basically knowledge representation are adapted to capture knowledge on complex industrial plants. More specifically, we are concerned with continuous production plants. From the complexity of such plants, we must organize our knowledge in a hierarchy (more exactly a thiness structure) of description and modelling. In such an organization a part of the process can be described with global relations which are not just the result of interconnexions of its subparts. This point implies that global relations are rather synthetic and imprecise (complexity is not compatible with complete precise modelling). We distinguish normal operating modes and failure cases with specific relations and rules to help fault detections and diagnosis. The control of complex plants is generally organizes in some kind of hierarchy and such structures must be represented, particularly the way control parameters are propagated along the system. Each entity which realizes a control task must be described by the relations it induces on a part of the process, these entities can be simple controller or more sophisticated computing elements. Some of these entities can be implemented in the main computer and we give some possible representations which seem adapted with the way experts in control communicate their knowledge. This implies to be able to interpret linguistic values, as used by humans, and to deal with hierarchical plans.

Guttman Scale Test for Maslow Need Hierarchy

Summary This study employed the Guttman scale to test the order of needs suggested by Maslow. The job context was defined as the universe, and 10 items of this universe were categorized into five needs. Managers and professionals (N = 101) employed in an industrial organization in Israel responded to a Porter type questionnaire (NSQ). The responses were re-coded and dichotomized. A Guttman scale consisting of five needs according to Maslow's theory was obtained. The scale provided the expected hierarchy with .94 coefficient of reproducibility. The test of Maslow's theory by the Guttman scale provided that the needs are scalable, regarding the universe of the job context. The scale is offered as evidence that some kind of hierarchy exists. It is, however, concerned with only one aspect of the theory, the order, and with only one of the regions that the theory attempts to explain.

Seven Kinds of Hierarchy in Homo Hierarchicus

I began work of this paper by trying to specify different kinds of hierarchy that Louis Dumont uses in Homo Hierarchicus.' Such an inventory, I thought, might be helpful to those who find book difficult to read. Unexpectedly, in course of exercise, I began to uncover Dumont's argument and to find what I take to be solutions to two of problems I had continued to have with this monumental work, even though it had been amply reviewed and discussed.2 I had been troubled by mystery of the mantle of our Lady, 'that odd process of encompassing and encompassed, and lack of fit between Dumont's model of Indian caste system and that of his AngloAmerican-trained colleagues.4 In paper below, I present inventory, argument, and solutions mentioned, as well as their implications for an understanding of Homo Hierarchicus by empirically oriented social scientist. Let us begin by taking Dumont's own vantage point, at what Yalman has referred to as watershed between Anglo-American schools of empirical philosophy and behaviourism and French rationalism.' At least for moment, let us accept Dumont's conviction that ideas are facts of greater importance than observable behavior. He defines caste system of India as system of ideas and values, a formal, comprehensible, rational system, a system in intellectual sense of term.'6 With this ideational tilt, Dumont confronts Indological conception of Hindu ideology-a conception partly inspired by French scholars interested in content of ancient Sanskrit and Pali texts: Bougle, Hocart, Mauss with Anglo-American-trained social anthropologists' field monographs, which reflect their concern with power in intergroup relations. These latter scholars-especially M. N. Srinivas, Adrian Mayer, and F. G. Bailey borrowed from Africanist anthropologist, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, concept of dominant clan; and they adapted it to fit Indian local caste system by referring to dominant caste.' They have also followed Evans-Pritchard in his definition of social structure as

Phenotypic reversion in some early blocked sporulation mutants of Bacillus subtilis: isolation and phenotype identification of partial revertants.

Single-step mutants of Bacillus subtilis blocked at stage zero of sporulation (spoO mutants) are pleiotropic. They are impaired in several traits, including increased sensitivity to polymyxin B, when compared to the wild type. Revertants for one or another of the traits associated in this pleiotropy have been isolated and classified according to their phenotypes. Attention was centered on partial revertants (spoO still), of which at least three classes could be recognized. Class I partial revertants recovered a high level of resistance to polymyxin and, in a constant order, a variable number of the other traits; some kind of hierarchy is thus revealed to exist among the traits affected in the original pleiotropy. Partial revertants in the other two classes are still hypersensitive to polymyxin. In class II revertants, ability to excrete exoenzymes and antibiotic(s) is recovered to various extents. Only inducibility of nitrate reductase by nitrate is recovered in class III mutants. The possible significance of these observations is discussed.

Competence for All as the Goal for Secondary Education

"One of the most serious flaws in our educa tional system has been its ironclad separation of academic and vocational preparation. This has tended to perpetuate the larger social flaw of a kind of hierarchy of occupational classifi cation which has little to do with the actual value of the work performed."