Determination of the financial impact of machine downtime on the Australia Post large letters sorting process

Machine downtime, whether planned or unplanned, is intuitively costly to manufacturing organisations, however is often very difficult to quantify. Costing processes are rarely undertaken within manufacturing organisations. It has previously been estimated that 80% of industrial facilities were unable to accurately cost downtime, with many facilities underestimating the total cost by a factor of 200-300% (Crumrine and Post 2006). It was also acknowledged that the lack of practical guides has hindered costing procedures of any nature being implemented more readily (Dale and Plunkett 1995). Models that did exist rarely considered more than a subset of the costs identified elsewhere, leading to overly conservative estimations. In addition, because cost definitions are not consistent, methodologies for evaluating and quantifying individual costs have not previously been adequately defined. The work outlined in this paper has aimed to develop the first comprehensive methodology for determining the cost of downtime, with particular application to the Australia Post's automated mail processing machines. The method presented may be applied to any manufacturing environment which would benefit from a more complete understanding of the magnitude of the cost of machine or process downtime

Recent advances on recursive filtering and sliding mode design for networked nonlinear stochastic systems: A survey

Copyright © 2013 Jun Hu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Some recent advances on the recursive filtering and sliding mode design problems for nonlinear stochastic systems with network-induced phenomena are surveyed. The network-induced phenomena under consideration mainly include missing measurements, fading measurements, signal quantization, probabilistic sensor delays, sensor saturations, randomly occurring nonlinearities, and randomly occurring uncertainties. With respect to these network-induced phenomena, the developments on filtering and sliding mode design problems are systematically reviewed. In particular, concerning the network-induced phenomena, some recent results on the recursive filtering for time-varying nonlinear stochastic systems and sliding mode design for time-invariant nonlinear stochastic systems are given, respectively. Finally, conclusions are proposed and some potential future research works are pointed out.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant nos. 61134009, 61329301, 61333012, 61374127 and 11301118, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under Grant no. GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

The Implementation of Emi (English Medium Instruction) in Indonesian Universities: Its Opportunities, Its Threats, Its Problems, and Its Possible Solutions

In this paper, I attempt to find out whether EMI (English Medium Instruction) can be an effective means of enhancing students\u27 and teachers\u27 language proficiency at university (bilingualism) and whether bilingualism necessarily leads to biliteracy. In addition, I would like to propose a model on which a smooth transition to a full EMI implementation can be achieved, should it be adopted. From literature reviews, I conclude that EMI (using English to teach content subjects) can be a better means of solving learners\u27 language problems than teaching English as a subject, because it allows learners more exposure to the language (comprehensible input) and more opportunity to use it (comprehensible output). However, due to its classroom-based nature, EMI is not likely to develop the four language skills (listening, reading, speaking, & writing) equally for both students and teachers. On the other hand, the assumption that EMI will automatically result in biliteracy is unsupported, because only bilinguals competent in both languages can take a full advantage of their bilingualism. Students or teachers who are not adequately developed in the language are likely to suffer academically, socially, and psychologically instead. Since research has found that total/full immersion is not the right method for language-incompetent students, the writer believes that both a bridging program and a partial EMI program are necessary at least at the initial stage of EMI implementation. The bridging program should be based on students\u27 and teachers\u27 academic and linguistic needs (EAP); the partial EMI program may be based on limitations on three factors: the participants, the scope of use, and the settings. Finally, in order for the program to run smoothly, mixed-mode teaching in the classroom should be discouraged and a conducive atmosphere for second language acquisition should be established both in the classroom and outside the classroo

“Two Minds Don’t Blink Alike”: The Attentional Blink Does Not Occur in a Joint Context

Typically, when two individuals perform a task together, each partner monitors the other partners' responses and goals to ensure that the task is completed efficiently. This monitoring is thought to involve a co-representation of the joint goals and task, as well as a simulation of the partners' performance. Evidence for such "co-representation" of goals and task, and "simulation" of responses has come from numerous visual attention studies in which two participants complete different components of the same task. In the present research, an adaptation of the attentional blink task was used to determine if co-representation could exert an influence over the associated attentional mechanisms. Participants completed a rapid serial visual presentation task in which they first identified a target letter (T1) and then detected the presence of the letter X (T2) presented one to seven letters after T1. In the individual condition, the participant identified T1 and then detected T2. In the joint condition, one participant identified T1 and the other participant detected T2. Across two experiments, an attentional blink (decreased accuracy in detecting T2 when presented three letters after T1) was observed in the individual condition, but not in joint conditions. A joint attentional blink may not emerge because the co-representation mechanisms that enable joint action exert a stronger influence at information processing stages that do not overlap with those that lead to the attentional blink

Structural brain complexity and cognitive decline in late life : A longitudinal study in the Aberdeen 1936 Birth Cohort

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