Pyramidal Hierarchy Research Articles

A proposal for sustainable groundwater management as influenced by a pyramid of social needs: the case of Israel's coastal aquifer

The psychologist Abraham Maslow developed a pyramid of human social needs. A comparable pyramidal hierarchy of groundwater needs can be envisaged. In the pyramid of social needs, until lower level needs are fulfilled, higher level needs remain irrelevant to people. Analogously, only once a society's basic groundwater concerns are fulfilled can groundwater management decision-makers hope to press onwards towards an ultimate goal of attaining sustainable groundwater resources development. Groundwater resources of the Sharon region of Israel's coastal aquifer can be taken as a case in point. To effectively carry out management recommendations for achieving sustainable groundwater development, technical concerns must be integrated with social concerns. Alignment between comparable levels of the pyramids of social and groundwater needs can only be achieved by educating the society to perceive the significance of sustainable resource development for future generations. Only then will the society be fully prepared to pay the price for such development and to participate in the long-term environmental planning required.

Interior area removal method for p y r a m i d

In previous years, pyramid, a hierarchical rule-based scheme for proximity effect correction in electron-beam lithography was presented. pyramid has produced good experimental results for large circuit patterns (up to 80 μm × 80 μm) with a minimum feature size of 0.1 μm in 200 and 500 nm poly(methylmethacrylate) (PMMA) on silicon. Although the circuits used to test pyramid in the past have contained a rapidly varying pattern density, they did not contain very large features (e.g., 10 μm × 10 μm) next to small (0.1 μm) elements. The previous method for performing circuit correction (edge adjustment) has been found to be inadequate when correcting such occurrences. In order to overcome this problem, a new correction technique has been added to the overall pyramid hierarchy. Previously, pyramid performed its correction by adjusting only the locations of the edges of circuit elements. This new correction technique expands upon the previous edge adjustment method by allowing pyramid to remove area from circuit elements not only from the edges, but also from the interior as well. This interior area removal technique substantially improves the correction in cases when small circuit elements are placed near very large features. This article motivates the use of interior area removal both through simulation and experimental results. Experimental results indicating the usefulness of interior area removal are provided.

Complementary Competition in Japan

OVERVIEW: Japan's success at adaptive RD but they also cooperate on major projects--especially when faced with external competition. Yet this model while effective when a known outside competitor (and clearly defined goals exist, may not be appropriate for the kind of path-breaking research Japan now seeks. As a result, Japanese companies are setting up R&D centers in other countries to benefit from cross-cultural exchanges that may bypass these cultural patterns. From feudal times until the beginning of the 20th century, Japan was an agrarian nation structured as a rigid pyramidal hierarchy, with the farming families at the bottom. These families, in turn, belonged to clans (hans), each of which was governed by a daimyo. Each small farm village was led by a resident samurai whose allegiance was also to the daimyo. Japan's 200 daimyos were subordinate to the shogun, who governed Japan in the name of the emperor. The efficient production of rice, Japan's primary agricultural product, required social cooperation and group contributions. At the same time, families, clans and villages competed among themselves--urged on by the local samurai--to produce the most rice and thereby prove their superior loyal to the daimyo. The feudal pyramidal structure of the country is still evident in corporate organizations (see Figure 1), as is the collaborative mentality that Japanese workers have inherited from their rural ancestors.(Figure 1 omitted) Although the correspondence between an agricultural and a corporate/national culture may not be exact, I believe it provides a useful heuristic device for exploring the successes of the corporate system. JAPAN'S HOMOGENEOUS CULTURE Japan is much more homogeneous ethnically and linguistically than other industrialized countries--a status resulting in part from more than 200 years of deliberate national isolation imposed by the shogunate (which ended with Perry's opening of Japan in 1853). The dichotomy between the nation and the outside world--the we-versus-they viewpoint--continues to inform Japanese notions of the world and is another important factor in Japan's competitive environment. The federal government's role in primary and secondary education has helped to reinforce this cultural homogeneity. Because the Ministry of Education oversees schooling, all Japanese students study the same curriculum at more or less the same time and, importantly, are inculcated with the same nationally-espoused values. Moreover, Japanese universities provide students with the same general course content (including emphasis on reading English to enable them to learn about offshore developments). Thus, basic received knowledge tends to be both uniform and universal. Added to this uniforming is the role that the larger group--society as a whole and, on a smaller scale, the corporation--plays in Japan: The group comes first, with individual desires traditionally subordinated to its good (although young Japanese have become more individualistic in recent years). These cultural and historical forces have important commercial and industrial implications for competitive and cooperative behavior. When a Japanese corporation hires graduates of Japanese schools, it knows that its managers will share cultural values with the new workers and therefore find it easy to communicate with them. In addition, the new employees will bring a common education to their jobs. These two factors facilitate training and help attain the corporate goal of a tightly organized and interdependent staff. …

A method of license plate extraction using a fast pyramid hierarchical hough transformation

AbstractPreviously, the authors proposed a method of extracting the region of a vehicle number‐plate using the Hough transformation with a restricted parameter plane. The method offers a significant reduction of the amounts of memories and their processing time which are required for storing the parameter plane in a conventional Hough transformation.This paper describes a further improvement of the method in its processing speed. In the processing, first, a pyramid hierarchy is applied to the original image; second, some preliminarily selected straight lines are extracted from the image with a pyramid hierarchy; finally, the region of the original image corresponding to each straight line is obtained. This method restricts the computation of the plane‐region‐distracted Hough transformation into the region of the straight lines already obtained so that calculation points and the processing time are reduced. As an example of application of the method, extraction of license plates is described.

A model for resource allocation in complex hierarchies

Most models of resource allocation activity usually assume either a black box or a simple pyramidal hierarchy of black boxes as the organizational context for decision making. However, there are a number of resource allocation activities that take place in more complex hierarchies. These cases have been slighted by researchers, in part, because of a lack of practicable models. This paper presents a multiple-criterion resource allocation model specifically directed towards non-pyramidal hierarchies and other more complex organizational structures. A number of examples are discussed and a numerical example is presented.

De rationaliteit van het overheidsmanagement in het Belgisch politiek systeem

Rational public decision-making is nearly impossible for two reasons : the organisational complexity of public services and the existence of two circuits, a political one (parties, parliament...), and an administrativeone (bureaucracy).Moreover, public decisions are made by different pressure groups, and from different decision centres. In Belgium the impact of political parties is steadily increasing, up to the point where they function as master-organisations that have set up their own institutions to carry out public tasks (e.g. education). In thesocio-economie field the government acts more often as an arbitrator and money-supplier than as a decision-maker.In the welfare state the government's position in the whole field of decision-making amounts to delegating decisions to private organisations and pressure groups, which in due course leads to corporatism andirrationality. Finally, the organisation structure of the civil service itself stimulates irrationality because it was set up as a pyramid hierarchy in a time when the government did not have many tasks.

Status Achievement and the Occupational Pyramid

T HE disporportionate distribution of prestige statuses and individual qualifications gives rise in every society to a problem which seeks some institutionalized solution. The problem arises from the fact that there are always fewer positions of prestige than there are individuals who potentially are qualified to fill them. Prestige by its very nature, is enhanced by scarcity and supersubordinate relationships assume a pyramidal hierarchy, while individual abilities apparently are distributed in a form approximating the bell shaped normal probability curve. Unless some means of life satisfaction is afforded those in the lower positions of the status hierarchy, discontent and frustration manifested in aberrant behavior and culminating in change in the social relationships may be expected with some confidence.' This relationship need not everywhere and at all times remain a problem. Primitive societies which have a minimal division of labor, in great measure, can escape the dilemma. In small, nonindustrial cultures office may be rotated or selected by lot or divination. The larger, more complex, non-industrial cultures through ascription of status and indoctrination concerning one's proper position in the hierarchy have avoided considerable stress. In caste-like societies such as India where the relationships are supported in the religious institution the closed pyramidal structure has been sustained for many centuries. Societies using an aristocracy similarly have been able to maintain a well-ordered division of labor through ascription of status and such subjective measures as mutual recognition of the rights and privileges of status obligations. Such devices preclude the notion of competition for positions and permit considerable stability in the division of labor, particularly where occupancy of position is predicated on divine or mystical sanction. At the same time, in handicraft cultures a considerable amount of satisfaction and self-expression is afforded by the nature of the occupation itself which offers a medium for channelization of individual ability and uniqueness. With the advent of industrialization, however, the relationship between position and qualification has become both more complex and more difficult to resolve. The vast division of labor and specialization accompanying industrialization has greatly expanded the occupational hierarchy. Mechanization has relegated a large number of occupations to mechanical routine, depriving them of virtually all manipulative or artistic satisfaction. In addition, techniques of mass production have deprived many workers of their traditional position in the status hierarchy of the past, so that rather than an integrated unit in a mutually sustaining relationship, they became a mechanical appendage to the industrial process.2 Rapid technological change and recruitment of occupational position on the basis of technical criteria of efficiency made ascription of occupational role impractical, and the development of democratic values completed the transition to achievement of status. The development of the economic institution favored the stratification of classes in terms of relationship to the productive order and supply and demand on the labor market so that prestige was contingent upon wealth and status identified with occupational role in a highly competitive market.3