Nowadays, production systems seek to integrate production and maintenance activities. An effective maintenance plan can improve maintenance stability and system performance. Machines that stop for repairing operation impose a high cost on the system. On the other hand, there are always some intangible situations during a production process in which repairing activities can be carried out. If th...

In poignant remembrance of the last Christmas in the Confederate White House, Varina Davis, First Lady of the Confederacy, reflected upon that special event in an extended article for the New York Sunday World, some thirty-two years after the Confederacy’s final Christmas. Davis recounted the event fondly and praised the transformation of her female peers into perfect models of Confederate endu...

This paper evaluates transformative policy innovations with respect to security and taxation in the three main Colombian cities: Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali. In the first two, such policies were associated with huge success. Elsewhere we (Gutiérrez et al. 2009) have tagged these transformation processes as ‘urban/metropolitan miracles’. The term comes from the fact that both common citizens and ...

Police investigation units represent a knowledge-intensive and time-critical environment. Knowledge sharing is a key process in investigations. In this paper, we present an empirical study of performance in police investigations. Police investigation units are defined as value shops, where primary detective work is performed. Knowledge sharing is found to have a significant influence on the pol...

We study the phase transition of the coalitional manipulation problem for generalized scoring rules. Previously it has been shown that, under some conditions on the distribution of votes, if the number of manipulators is o ( √ n), where n is the number of voters, then the probability that a random profile is manipulable by the coalition goes to zero as the number of voters goes to infinity, whe...

Migration as well as group conflict has occurred throughout history. This thesis examined why in response to internal migration to Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi there are varying levels of nativism. The level of nativism was found to be high in Mumbai, medium in Delhi, and low in Bangalore. Anti-migrant sentiment was explained by political competition in Mumbai, class prejudice in Delhi, and an ...

We present a new protocol for reliable data transfer in time-critical applications with zero tolerance for data loss in wireless sensor networks which uses less time and fewer messages in comparison to an established protocol PSFQ. Two key features of our protocol are out-of-sequence forwarding of packets with a priority order for sending different types of messages at nodes and delaying the re...