In spite of thevast researchpublishedon leanmanufacturing systems in several disciplines in the last decade, the concept remains underdeveloped for two reasons. First, it lacks a generally accepted definition. Different authors define lean in terms of its objectives, which vary, overlap and differ in different firms. Second, no study has developed a systematic and relative measure of lean produ...

Physicians are under tremendous pressure to act, especially in emergencies. ‘Don’t just stand there, do something! After all, you’re a doctor!’, is a common admonition. Nevertheless, oftentimes the best action is inaction. ‘Watchful waiting’ is the term used for this strategy. Physicians should be familiar with clinical tools to decide which of both strategies is appropriate in a given situatio...

ion in weighting tasks may allow for earlier application of the multiplicative rule. Schlottmann and Christoferou (in preparation) tested this possibility by giving fourto tenyear-olds a conjunctive area task and two weighting tasks, an EV task and a novel sourcemessage task. As predicted, the younger children multiplied in both weighting tasks, but added in the area task, supporting the view t...

While software design patterns are a generally useful concept, they are often (and mistakenly) seen as ready-made universal recipes for solving common problems. In a way, the danger is that programmers stop thinking about their actual problem, and start looking for pre-cooked solutions in some design pattern book instead. What people usually forget about design patterns is that the underlying p...

Absolute parallelism geometry is frequently used for physical applications. It has two main defects, from the point of view of applications. The first is the identical vanishing of its curvature tensor. The second is that its autoparallel paths do not represent physical trajectories. The present work shows how these defects were treated in the course of development of the geometry. The new vers...

Distribution of magnetic fields in the quiet-Sun internetwork areas has been affected by weak polarization (in particular Stokes Q and U) signals. To improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the weak polarization signals, several approaches, including temporal integrations, have been proposed in the literature. In this study, we aim to investigate a proper temporal-integration time with which...