This paper describes a project undertaken at BAE SYSTEMS to study the process of Continuous Improvement (CI) from a knowledge perspective. We used the Knowledge Structure Mapping (KSM) technique to identify ways of managing the underlying knowledge resource in order to share and disseminate best practice and thereby increase the effectiveness of CI on site. A secondary goal was to investigate t...

This is an introduction to some recent developments in string theory and M theory. We try to concentrate on the main physical aspects, and often leave more technical details to the original literature. In the past four years, a series of exciting developments in the area of supersymmetric field theories and string theory has completely changed the landscape of these subjects. Duality has been t...

We study the workload (unfinished work) and the waiting time of the queueing system with MAP arrivals under D-policy. The D-policy stipulates that the idle server begin to serve the customers only when the sum of the service times of all waiting customers exceeds some fixed threshold D. We first set up the system equations for workload and obtain the steady-state distributions of workloads at a...

101 Health inequalities have been found in all developed countries and for almost all diseases. Marked differences in health status occur between population groups as defined by gender, geography, ethnicity and socio-economic status. For example, affluent, privileged people have better health and lower mortality than poor, disadvantaged people (RACP, 1999). The UK has been tracking the health g...

The problem of two cracks emanating from the same origin and propagating asymmetrically at different velocities in an elastic and isotropic solid is treated in this paper. An unbounded and otherwise undisturbed medium and a constant anti-plane loading at infinity were assumed. Techniques of self-similar elastodynamics were utilized in conjunction with analytic-function theory. Since a closed-fo...

In this work, we propose a novel and efficient solution for the generalized multipole technique (GMT): the localized iterative generalized multipole technique (LIGMT). In LIGMT, an analytic constraint is imposed on the power radiated by the set of multipole sources sharing the same origin, rendering it minimum over a given angular sector. In this way, the power radiated by each set of multipole...