Senior Experts Research Articles

Simplifying the Six Sigma Toolbox through Application of Shainin DOE Techniques

The success of a Six Sigma programme in an organization depends to a large extent on the success of the Six Sigma projects, which in turn depends on how the team handles the problem and whether the right combination of tools is being applied to address the root cause. The Six Sigma toolbox consists of a wide range of tools comprising, on the one hand, simple and commonly used tools like flow charts, Pareto analysis, and cause-and-effect diagram and the more advanced statistical tools like design of experiments, regression analysis and many more, on the other hand. While the simple tools are easy to apply, understand, and analyse, engineers perceive the more advanced tools difficult to comprehend. Design of experiments (DOE) is one such tool. Two well-known approaches of design of experiments are the Classical DOE, pioneered by Sir Ronald A Fisher and the Taguchi approach, pioneered by Dr Genichii Taguchi. A third approach to experimental design—the Shainin DOE techniques, offered by Dr Dorian Shainin—can be considered as a very good alternative to the other approaches. They are much simpler than the factorial designs, response surface designs, and orthogonal arrays of the conventional approaches of DOE, but at the same time are recognized as being very powerful and effective in solving the chronic quality problems that plague most manufacturers. Shainin DOE basically works at eliminating suspected process variables by mostly using seven different tools, viz., Multi-Vari Charts Component Search Paired Comparison Variable Search Full Factorials B vs. C (Better vs. Current) Analysis Scatter Plots or Realistic Tolerance Parallelogram Plots. Though not very well documented, these tools have proved to be the key drivers in the success of many companies, e.g., Motorola. This article examines two projects of a leading automotive and general lighting lamp manufacturing company, in which a combination of the standard Six Sigma tools and Shainin tools has been successfully used to address the root cause of the problems. The advantage of using Shainin tools is that: Very small sample sizes are required to analyse the problem. Often samples as small as 2 or 3 are enough to make statistically valid conclusions. Statistical software is not required to analyse the data. In fact, Shainin DOE does not even require knowledge of complex statistical tools. It involves employees at all levels, including workers and junior staff in problem solving that was hitherto a domain of senior technical experts. Also, the success of the projects had a very positive effect on the morale of the employees in terms of convincing them that Six Sigma is not all about using complex statistical tools.

Dispute Review Boards: Expected Application on Egyptian Large-Scale Construction Projects

The construction industry is heavily affected by the troubles arising out of construction disputes, especially when it comes to large-scale projects, as a direct result of the inherent complexity of such projects. This paper seeks the most suitable dispute-resolution mechanism for large-scale construction projects in Egypt, which is a developing country in the Middle East with an emerging reformed economical policy, a population in excess of 70 million people, and an increasing need for infrastructure and industrial development. This dispute-resolution mechanism was attained through a multistep methodology that (1) started with the study of the Arbitration process in relation to an Egyptian construction project with an initial contract price of 85 million; (2) continued with interviews of five senior experts in the field of construction disputes in Egypt about their views pertaining to the most efficient dispute-resolution methodology for Egyptian megaprojects; (3) developed a tailored questionnaire to as...

UNESCO's activities in view of the Gulf ecosystems

UNESCO's activities in view of the Gulf ecosystems

Inter‐expert agreement of seven criteria in causality assessment of adverse drug reactions

To evaluate agreement between five senior experts when assessing seven causality criteria and the probability of drug causation. A sample of 31 adverse event-drug pairs was constituted. For each pair, five experts separately assessed (i) the probability of drug causation, which was secondarily divided into seven causality levels: ruled out (0-0.05), unlikely (0.06-0.25), doubtful (0.26-0.45), indeterminate (0.46-0.55), plausible (0.56-0.75), likely (0.76-0.95), and certain (0.96-1); and (ii) seven causality criteria. To test discrepancies between experts, the kappa index was used. The agreement of the five experts was very poor (kappa = 0.05) for the probability of drug causation. Among the seven levels of causality, only 'doubtful' showed a significant rate of agreement (kappa = 0.32, P < 0.001). For all criteria, the kappa index was significant except for the item 'risk(s) factor(s)' (kappa = 0.09). Agreement between experts was good (0.64, P < 0.001) only for the criterion 'reaction at site of application or toxic plasma concentration of the drug or validated test'. However, the rate of agreement with kappa indices of the causality criteria ranged from 0.12 to 0.38. This study confirms that in the absence of an operational procedure, agreement between experts is low. This should be considered when designing a causality assessment method. In particular, criteria inducing a low level of agreement should have their weight reduced.

SU‐AA‐BRA‐01: Professional Council Symposium — Practice Quality Improvement

More demands are being made on Medical Physicists than ever before. Increasingly sophisticated technology is being introduced into clinical practice at an accelerated pace with little time to train the patient care team. Concurrently, there is a calling for higher quality and safety in clinical practice as well as decreasing funding associated with technical tasks. Surveys performed by the AAPM indicate that a primary reason physicists attend the annual meeting is to acquire information to improve their job performance and efficiency. The Professional Program is structured to address these concerns.The issue of quality improvement, how to define and improve quality in clinical practice is the topic of several presentations. The program kicks off with the Professional Symposium and an overview of the many aspects of our profession that contribute to quality care. In the core presentation of the Symposium, Dr. Michael Rock will discuss quality care and quality improvement in health care at the institutional and national level. This puts the efforts in the profession of medical physics into perspective in the larger quality paradigm.The Professional Program continues with discussions on technical performance and the development of performance standards for established technologies followed by a presentation on how to successfully integrate new technology into practice. Additional personnel are often needed to perform new, more complex activities and justifying the required level of staffing to support these programs is the reviewed. The new member symposium provides an overview of the organizational structure of the AAPM, and how to get the most out of both professional and academic opportunities. Senior experts in the field will also be available to discuss what they have learned in their many years in medical physics.Training of personnel is essential to quality practice and education carries serious responsibility for those providing the training. For those acting as preceptors, the expectations and liabilities of this role will be explained.Despite our best efforts, things go wrong. Several sessions focus on errors in practice, how to identify potential errors, diminish the chance of errors occurring and how to develop quality measures that prevent errors. The role of regulatory agencies is also described and how they participate in accomplishing our common goal of safe, high quality patient care. The final session addresses a need that has not been adequately addressed in our profession. This is the topic of writing bid specifications for major equipment purchases. We all do this, but there are few guidelines on how to actually put these bid specifications together properly.The focus of the Professional Program is quality in patient care, how to define it, improve it, and practice it. The goal is to provide a professional program of use to you personally in your professional and academic endeavors.Educational Objectives:1. To understand current definitions of quality care.2. To understand how professional efforts contribute to improved quality of care.3. To provide direct and useful information for practicing medical physicists.

The Chosen ONES: Awards Fund Young Investigators

A major goal of the 2006 NIEHS Strategic Plan encompasses the institute’s desire to “recruit and train the next generation of environmental health scientists.” To begin to achieve that goal, the NIEHS has unveiled a new annual grants program called the Outstanding New Environmental Scientist (ONES) Award. The five-year grants are designed to identify, encourage, inspire, and support outstanding investigators early in their careers, who have not yet received their first R01 grant. The first ONES grants, totaling $3.6 million, were awarded in September 2006 to eight promising young scientists chosen from more than 70 applicants through a rigorous application, review, and interview process. The program is the brainchild of NIEHS director David Schwartz, who has been concerned for some time about the loss of promising young scientific talent from the field for lack of support. “As a faculty member at Duke,” he says, “I found that the individuals who were particularly vulnerable in terms of their career development were those at that transitional stage between mentored and independent research, and that many very bright, creative people simply were not supported in ways that enhanced their career development.” Schwartz says the awards are also intended to help attract innovative young investigators to the NIEHS and the environmental health sciences, as well as to support the institutions that are helping new scientists develop their careers. The program’s long-term impact on the field, in terms of both the science and the scientists, could be significant. “These individuals represent very promising early career trajectories that are likely to have a substantial effect on environmental health sciences, and hopefully will evolve into the leaders in the field in the future,” says Schwartz. To ease that tricky early-career transition, ONES grantees are encouraged to establish and meet annually with an advisory committee comprising senior experts in their disciplines. According to Pat Mastin, chief of the NIEHS Cellular, Organ, and Systems Pathobiology Branch, who helped coordinate the initial ONES process, the grants represent a hybrid between mentored career development awards and independent R01 grants. “We think the young investigators should continue to be mentored,” Mastin says. “So we encouraged them to identify not a specific mentor, but an advisory committee, to give not only scientific advice but also career path advice.” The grantees recognize and appreciate the value of this hybrid approach to mentoring. “It gives us access to people we wouldn’t normally be interacting with,” says ONES grantee Thomas Begley, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the University at Albany State University of New York. “Having a mechanism to ensure that will promote good science on my end, and also will help me network with others in the field.” Grantee Patricia Opresko, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at the University of Pittsburgh, agrees. “The grant has funds that will allow the four investigators on my advisory committee to come to Pittsburgh and meet with me once a year to focus on my project and offer their ideas, insight, input, and criticisms,” she says. “It adds an additional layer of mentoring that is really critical for a young investigator’s development.”

Encuentros Latinoamericanos de Fotoquímica y Fotobiología (ELAFOT): The Latin‐American Photochemical and Photobiological Community¶

ABSTRACTThe photochemical and photobiological researchers in Latin American meet biannually at a regional meeting known as Encuentros Latinoamericanos de Fotoquímica y Fotobiología (ELAFOT). The goals of this series of meetings are to discuss leading scientific work, to become acquainted with the latest research findings in the discipline, to exchange ideas, to initiate collaborations between groups and to strengthen the scientific interactions between young researchers and senior experts from the region and from developed countries. During 8–12 November 2004, the eighth such meeting took place in La Plata, Argentina. In this introduction we present a brief history of the ELAFOT meetings and a summary of the most recent gathering and the papers presented in this Symposium‐in‐Print.

Probability Theory on Trees and Analysis of Algorithms

The analysis of algorithms and data structures, started by D. Knuth, is a rapidly growing area at the interface of Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science. Probability theory enters the subject in a natural way when studying an algorithm as to its performance over randomized inputs and/or if an algorithm itself takes randomization steps. The latter holds true for so-called divide and conquer algorithms, which were a central topic of this workshop. The sorting algorithm is presumably the most prominent example. While early work was mostly based on the generating function approach, the last two decades have seen an increasing number of contributions based on probabilistic methods involving martingales, random trees and other stochastic processes. The first article of this type was written in the eighties by L. Devroye, a Humboldt award winner of 2004 and also one of the organizers. Later another pioneering contribution came by U. Rösler who, by introducing weighted branching processes and the contraction method, determined the asymptotic distributional behavior of . One can say that much of the work presented at this workshop is to some extent spawn by these articles. The aim and scope of the mini-workshop was to bring together leading junior and senior experts in the field with a strong probabilistic background and a focus on divide an conquer algorithms and related data structures. There were 16 one hour talks presented by 12 of the 14 participants from 7 countries. Main topics were branching processes, the contraction method, the asymptotic analysis of random trees, stochastic fixed point equations and randomized algorithms.

Agreement of expert judgment in causality assessment of adverse drug reactions

Global introspection is, with operational algorithms and Bayes' theorem, one of the three main approaches used to assess the causal relationship between a drug treatment and the occurrence of an adverse event. To analyze and compare the judgments of five senior experts using global introspection about drug causation on a random set of putative adverse drug reactions. A random sample of 150 drug-effect pairs was constituted. For each pair, five senior experts had to independently assess the probability of drug causation from 0 to 1 by using a 100 mm visual analog scale (VAS). For analysis, those probabilities were secondarily split into seven levels of causality: excluded (0-0.05); unlikely (0.06-0.25); doubtful (0.26-0.45); unassessable/unclassifiable (0.46-0.55); plausible (0.56-0.75); likely (0.75-0.95); and certain (0.95-1). Agreement among the five experts was assessed using kappa coefficients (kappa). The overall agreement between experts was poor (kappa=0.20), although significantly different from chance, and varied according to the level of causality. It was lower for the unlikely, doubtful, unassessable/unclassifiable, and plausible categories (kappa=0.03, 0.03, -0.01, and 0.13, respectively) than for VAS extremes: excluded, likely, and certain (kappa=0.40, 0.32, and 0.30, respectively). This study confirms that experts express marked disagreements when assessing drug causality independently. The agreement rate was lower for intermediate levels of causality, especially when strong evidence was lacking for confirming or ruling out drug causality. Therefore, in a decision-making context, a step-by-step consensual approach such as the Delphi method seems necessary to make the assessment of such cases more reliable.

Encuentros Latinoamericanos de Fotoquimica y Fotobiologia (ELAFOT): The Latin-American Photochemical and Photobiological Community

The photochemical and photobiological researchers in Latin American meet biannually at a regional meeting known as Encuentros Latinoamericanos de Fotoquímica y Fotobiología (ELAFOT). The goals of this series of meetings are to discuss leading scientific work, to become acquainted with the latest research findings in the discipline, to exchange ideas, to initiate collaborations between groups and to strengthen the scientific interactions between young researchers and senior experts from the region and from developed countries. During 8-12 November 2004, the eighth such meeting took place in La Plata, Argentina. In this introduction we present a brief history of the ELAFOT meetings and a summary of the most recent gathering and the papers presented in this Symposium-in-Print.

Encuentros Latinoamericanos de Fotoquímica y Fotobiología (ELAFOT): The Latin-American Photochemical and Photobiological Community¶

The photochemical and photobiological researchers in Latin American meet biannually at a regional meeting known as Encuentros Latinoamericanos de Fotoquimica y Fotobiologia (ELAFOT). The goals of this series of meetings are to discuss leading scientific work, to become acquainted with the latest research findings in the discipline, to exchange ideas, to initiate collaborations between groups and to strengthen the scientific interactions between young researchers and senior experts from the region and from developed countries. During 8-12 November 2004, the eighth such meeting took place in La Plata, Argentina. In this introduction we present a brief history of the ELAFOT meetings and a summary of the most recent gathering and the papers presented in this Symposium-in-Print.

Shining light on "Dark Winter".

On 22--23 June 2001, the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, in collaboration with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Analytic Services Institute for Homeland Security, and the Oklahoma National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, held a senior-level exercise entitled "Dark Winter" that simulated a covert smallpox attack on the United States. The first such exercise of its kind, Dark Winter was constructed to examine the challenges that senior-level policy makers would face if confronted with a bioterrorist attack that initiated outbreaks of highly contagious disease. The exercise was intended to increase awareness of the scope and character of the threat posed by biological weapons among senior national security experts and to bring about actions that would improve prevention and response strategies.

Staub und Sterne. Aufsatze zur deutsch-judischen Literatur

Pazi, Margarita. Staub and Sterne. Aufsatze zur deutsch-judischen Literatur Gottingen: Wallstein, 2001. 300pp. DM 48.00 paperback. Edited by Sigrid Bauschinger and Paul Michael Lutzeler, two of the foremost senior experts in German-Jewish and minority literature, and recommended by Ruth Kluger, the distinguished author of weiter leben, this edition of selected scholarly articles by the late Margarita Pazi comes with the highest recommendations. To Pazi, who had a prominent career as Professor of German language and literature at Tel Aviv University, many of the authors whose works she examined were her peers in more than one way. Like Max Brod, Else Lasker-Schuler, and Jenny Aloni as well as less well-known authors of German language in Israel, history had forced Pazi to work on the periphery of two dominant discourses, that of postwar German Studies and post-Shoah Jewish Studies. Pazi wrote with authority and sensitivity derived from her intimate knowledge and first-hand experience of the processes shaping and affecting German speaking culture in Israel, and she brought the same keen insights to writers from her native Bohemia, including Kafka and Werfel. Pazi was a scholar of the old school in the best sense of the word. Her insights are supported by a wealth of detailed information, which occasionally stands in the way of more abstract, theoretical conclusions. Indeed, Pazi is careful to avoid universalizing and anchors her analysis in concrete facts, historical, biographical, and social. Without the kind of basic research for which she became known many of the Israeli German authors she introduced to German and Jewish Studies, Werner Kraft, Alice Schwarz, Netti Boleslav, Fritz Nashitz, and Hanna Blitzer, among many others, would be forgotten. So would be the less prominent authors of the Prague Circle, another one of her areas of specialization. Indeed, it was history itself that required Pazi to begin with the basics, which meant collecting information about writers whose names, had the Nazis had their will, would have been erased from the annals of literary history. Largely due to Pazi's attempts to reintroduce the multiply repressed German-Jewish literary legacy in Israel and its authors to scholars of German these authors continue to be reprinted, anthologized, and studied by a select readership. Pazi's position as a scholar was difficult. A professor of German in Israel, who published and lectured internationally in German, she was the representative of a problematic tradition in a country where for decades things German were suspect. When the terms German and Jewish were cast as irreconcilable opposites, Pazi dared analyze and discuss the literary themes and styles that had evolved from the tenuous history of Jewish emancipation and assimilation in Central Europe. Pazi revealed that for one or two generations, at least, the German-Jewish cultural heritage continued to be productive in Israel. Poetry and prose written in German by writers, the majority of whom had been born at the turn of the century, were devoted to a once flourishing European Jewish culture, addressed the horrors of the Shoah or the anguish of exile, and examined the difficulty of adjusting to life in the newly founded Jewish state. …

The risk of risk

This is an exclusive extract from The ValueReporting Revolution: Moving Beyond the Earnings Game, a new book published by John Wiley &amp; Sons, Inc., and written by four senior PricewaterhouseCoopers experts. In this extract they discuss the dilemma of risk management and risk reporting. They argue that there are difficulties in disclosing risk on the grounds that it causes problems with competitors and investors alike. There is also a lack of consensus of how market risk should be measured. They assess how to quantify operational risk and conclude that the gap between improving risk management techniques and risk disclosures needs to be closed.

Beyond cloth and cordage: archaeological textile research in the Americas

In recent years, archaeological textile research has undergone a major expansion in scope. Once primarily concerned with the simple description of fabrics, basketry, and cordage, textile researchers now routinely employ these highly perishable artifacts as windows into ancient cultural systems, using theoretical modeling, stylistic and structural analysis, and cutting-edge analytical technology to explore issues of production, exchange, ethnic identity, and social status.Beyond Cloth and Cordage is an overview of current research on New World archaeological fabrics. It demonstrates that textile data is a unique means of addressing questions of broad anthropological interest, as well as problems difficult if not impossible to resolve by other means. Contributing authors include senior experts and others whose work is breaking new ground in a variety of topics. Encompassing both method and theory, these include the recovery and care of textile remains, microanalytical methods, models of production and exchange, and inferences regarding social status, behavior, and ethnicity. The broad geographical scope includes case studies from northeastern North America, the Great Basin, the American Southwest, Mesoamerica, and Andean South America.

Energy management and environmental awareness in China's enterprises

By virtue of the country's size, population and heavy dependance on coal, China's situation should be of particular interest to all with a concern both for energy conservation and the environment. Efforts to conserve energy in China's enterprises must be carried on alongside rapid development and the transition from a command economy to a more hybrid `market socialist’ economy. This transition may in the longer term offer opportunities for energy conservation, but in the meanwhile can be seen as imposing constraints. This paper is the result of field work undertaken in China over the period 1994–1997. The paper begins by outlining the contradictory context for energy conservation in China — the international concern about climate change and acid rain, and the domestic imperatives of modernization and transformation of the economy. Then, setting out briefly the position with regard to energy supply and consumption, and measures for conservation and enforcement, it reports the views of managers at three important industrial plants on energy and related environmental matters, and more generally of some of the most senior officials and experts in China concerned with forming policy on energy conservation in China's enterprises. Because little is known of the views of such practitioners outside China, these views are presented in some detail, and analyzed against the background of the broader changes taking place in China today. The paper concludes with a number of specific recommendations to aid progress on conservation, as they have been put forward by Chinese experts.

A report card on continuous quality improvement.

Efforts to incorporate the principles of continuous quality improvement (CQI) into health care have been underway for about ten years. In order to understand the lessons of this decade of experience, senior organizational leaders and experts in the field of health care were interviewed. This select group agreed that there have been concrete accomplishments: the tactic of assigning blame for mistakes to individuals is gradually giving way to an emphasis on detecting problems with process; there is a new focus on the health care customer; and many valuable projects have been inaugurated. Nevertheless, the interviews underlined the reality that the movement has not yet made a sizable impact on the U.S. health care system. Until there is a profound, organization-wide recognition of the need for change, universal commitment to CQI principles will not be achieved.

G7-P8—Senior experts group on Transnational Organized Crime

G7-P8—Senior experts group on Transnational Organized Crime

G7-P8—Senior Experts Group on Transnational Organized Crime

G7-P8—Senior Experts Group on Transnational Organized Crime

G7-P8—Senior experts group on Transnational Organized Crime

G7-P8—Senior experts group on Transnational Organized Crime