Since the release of ISO 14001 in 1996, China has witnessed a surge in the number of ISO 14001 certification. As an international environmental standard, ISO 14001 has two basic functions: one is playing as an environmental management instrument, while the other as a signal of firms’ better environmental performance to stakeholders. Based on the stakeholder theory, we have examined the effects ...

ISO 9000 is the most popular and widely adopted meta-standard for quality and operational improvements in manufacturing supply chains. However, few studies have quantitatively examined its impact on supply chain efficiency. In this paper we measure the material and cash flow efficiency of ISO 9000 certified firms in terms of inventory days and account receivable days. We analyzed changes in the...

The study statistically tests the proposition of the ISO/IEC 9126 standard that higher external quality (quality when software is executed) implies higher ‘quality in use’. For this purpose, the study based on 75 user survey data shows that individual external quality subcharacteristics are positively associated with user satisfaction as defined in ‘quality in use’. This study also investigates...

This paper discusses a methodological approach to define quality models (QM) for Web sites of any kind, including Web 2.0 sites. The approach stresses the practical use of a QM, in requirement definition and quality assessment, during design & development processes or during site operation. An important requirement for such QMs is organization mapping, which allows who is in charge of quality m...

This year, the DEFT campaign (Défi Fouilles de Textes) incorporates a task which aims at identifying the session in which articles of previous TALN conferences were presented. We describe the three statistical systems developed at LIA/ADOC for this task. A fusion of these systems enables us to obtain interesting results (micro-precision score of 0.76 measured on the test corpus). Mots-clés : cl...

The present study tested two techniques for dietary supplementation of Crassostrea gigas spat with PUFA, such as arachidonic acid (AA). The first technique consisted of a preliminary enrichment and growth of an algal concentrate (T-ISO, Isochrysis sp.) with AA dissolved in an ethanol solution, the whole culture then being fed to the spat. This enrichment increased the AA weight percentage in T-...

The use of forklifts to move material is very common in large manufacturing companies. Exposure to whole body vibration from industrial vehicles such as forklifts has been associated with low back pain and also with the degeneration of intervertebral disc. Predicted health risks, associated with the operation of forklifts, based on ISO 2631-1 criteria are limited and have not yet been determine...

Mitochondrial dysfunction contributes to cardiac ischemia-reperfusion (IR) injury but volatile anesthetics (VA) may alter mitochondrial function to trigger cardioprotection. We hypothesized that the VA isoflurane (ISO) mediates cardioprotection in part by altering the function of several respiratory and transport proteins involved in oxidative phosphorylation (OxPhos). To test this we used fluo...

We examined the effects of several E-ring and F-ring isoprostanes on mechanical and electrophysiological activity in porcine coronary artery. Several isoprostanes evoked concentration-dependent contractions, with 8-iso-PGE2 being the most potent (-log EC50 of 6.9 +/- 0.1); this excitatory effect has been described in detail elsewhere and was not examined further here. 8-iso-PGE2 evoked dose-dep...