This study examined the effect of agriculture faculty training in and practice of methodologies to explicitly teach critical thinking skills related to course content and subsequent change in student critical thinking disposition. Twelve instructors in 14 agriculture courses underwent a year–long program of instruction in effective critical thinking development. Students completed the Universit...

Abstract—This study optimized the performance of plastic extrusion process of drip irrigation pipes using fuzzy goal programming. Two main responses were of main interest; roll thickness and hardness. Four main process factors were studied. The L18 array was then used for experimental design. The individualmoving range control charts were used to assess the stability of the process, while the p...

Process capability index Cpk has been widely used in the manufacturing industry as a process performance measure. In this paper, we investigate the natural estimator of the index Cpk, and show that under the assumption of normality its distribution can be expressed as a mixture of the chi-square and the normal distributions. We also implement the theory of hypothesis testing using the natural e...

Capability indices measure the performance of a process. Although process yield is the primary focus on the performance criteria, the " ( , ) p C u v indices combine process yield and process centering. With this compromise, there is no direct link between the process yield and these indices, but literature provides lower and upper bounds for the process yield. However errors in the proposed re...

A process is a unique combination of manpower, machines, methods and materials in providing a product or service. Process capability indices have been used in the manufacturing industry to provide quantitative measures of process potential and performance. High quality production provides advantages such as cost saving, reduced scrap or remanufacturing, higher yield and increased customer satis...

A new economic approach to process capability assessment is presented, which differs from the commonly used engineering metrics. The proposed metric consists of two economic capability measures – the expected profit and the variation in profit of the process. This dual economic metric offers a number of significant advantages over other engineering or economic metrics used in process capability...

Process capability indices are designed to describe how the process of interest can achieve to meet specification limits under a condition of statistical control. One of the capability indices is denoted as Cpm proposed by Chan, Cheng and Spiring (1988), sometimes termed the Taguchi index. The primary goal of this paper attempts to construct a confidence interval for Cpm, which measures proces...

Greenwich and Jahr-Schaffrath (1995) introduced an index Cpp, a simple transformation of the index C∗ pm, which provides an uncontaminated separation between information concerning the process accuracy and process precision. Unfortunately, the index Cpp inconsistently measures process capability in many cases and thus reflects process potential and performance inaccurately. In this paper, we co...

Spaceborne thermal sensors provide important physical parameters for urban studies. However, due to technical constraints, spaceborne thermal sensors yield a trade-off between their spatial and temporal resolution. The aims of this study are (1) to downscale the three originally low spatial resolution (960 m) Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS/Terra) land surface temperature i...