Towards successful implementation of 5Ss in a U.S. manufacturing company with Indian sub-continent workers

XYZ is a manufacturing organization located in Michigan, in the Eastern North Central U.S., and it has a diverse workforce consisting of immigrants from Asia, Europe, and South America. The majority of the workers are immigrants from the Indian Sub-Continent. XYZ has been in the process of implementing 5Ss; however, it has been unable to sustain 5S standards. This study was conducted to identify the role of the Indian Sub-Continent workers’ culture and religion on 5S implementation and to suggest how this company can work with this group in successfully implementing the 5Ss. The researcher is employed in this organization and is well acquainted with the employees. The research design chosen for this research is ethnography. The researcher spent six months interviewing and observing 33 employees of the XYZ organization, acting as researcher and participant observer, while immersing himself in their lives. This helped him observe their behavioral patterns, understand their worldview, and gain insight into their personal opinions. The theme that emerged from this research is that Desi (people from the Indian Sub-Continent) trust each other and can work effectively in teams. The Desi workers, as a group, have similar values such as respecting elders and helping others; however, they also demonstrated some behavioral differences. The Indian Sub-Continent workers are submissive, strictly following the orders of their supervisor, and many times this results in their failure to complete the task according to 5S standards. Specifically, the workers always have one task waiting ahead of them, and the supervisor wants them to quickly complete one task and go on to the next one

Perceptual fail: Female power, mobile technologies and images of self

Like a biological species, images of self have descended and modified throughout their journey down the ages, interweaving and recharging their viability with the necessary interjections from culture, tools and technology. Part of this journey has seen images of self also become an intrinsic function within the narratives about female power; consider Helen of Troy “a face that launched a thousand ships” (Marlowe, 1604) or Kim Kardashian (KUWTK) who heralded in the mass mediated ‘selfie’ as a social practice. The interweaving process itself sees the image oscillate between naturalized ‘icon’ and idealized ‘symbol’ of what the person looked like and/or aspired to become. These public images can confirm or constitute beauty ideals as well as influence (via imitation) behaviour and mannerisms, and as such the viewers belief in the veracity of the representative image also becomes intrinsically political manipulating the associated narratives and fostering prejudice (Dobson 2015, Korsmeyer 2004, Pollock 2003). The selfie is arguably ‘a sui generis,’ whilst it is a mediated photographic image of self, it contains its own codes of communication and decorum that fostered the formation of numerous new digital communities and influenced new media aesthetics . For example the selfie is both of nature (it is still a time based piece of documentation) and known to be perceptually untrue (filtered, modified and full of artifice). The paper will seek to demonstrate how selfie culture is infused both by considerable levels of perceptual failings that are now central to contemporary celebrity culture and its’ notion of glamour which in turn is intrinsically linked (but not solely defined) by the province of feminine desire for reinvention, transformation or “self-sexualisation” (Hall, West and McIntyre, 2012). The subject, like the Kardashians or selfies, is divisive. In conclusion this paper will explore the paradox of the perceptual failings at play within selfie culture more broadly, like ‘Reality TV’ selfies are infamously fake yet seem to provide Debord’s (1967) illusory cultural opiate whilst fulfilling a cultural longing. Questions then emerge when considering the narrative impact of these trends on engendered power structures and the traditional status of illusion and narrative fiction

Technological impact on the art of moviemaking: deploying new and convergent media to redefine a model for Pakistan’s cinema

This thesis examines the decline in Pakistani cinema during the last two decades. It examines the history of the cinema and exposes some possible, previously ignored, causes for that decline. This research led the author to ask “Can new and convergent media be helpful in reviving the Pakistani cinema?” The thesis introduces the ideas of established and emergent cinema, building on the work of Williams (1977) in discussing the ideas of dominant, residual and emergent culture. The exploration reveals two gaps in the film industry: first, the lack of training in the making of films; and, second, the change in possible production methods allowed by new and emergent technologies. The thesis addresses both of these gaps by suggesting new production paradigms which incorporate the new technology and by examining two scripts to develop methodologies for teaching. The scripts are produced into films as the practice section of the research. The first film, creative element 1, is developed using some of the new tehnologies, students as crew and the available resources of an educational establishment to test the methodologies that have been derived. The outcomes of the creative element 1 laid the foundation of the second film, creative element 2. It is shot on mobile phones and distributed from Pakistan through Vimeo with a negligible budget. The social networks helped to arrange equipment and locations and allowed extreme freedom to the filmmaker

Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Processing 2010

This book contains state-of-the-art contributions to the 10th conference on Natural Language Processing, KONVENS 2010 (Konferenz zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache), with a focus on semantic processing. The KONVENS in general aims at offering a broad perspective on current research and developments within the interdisciplinary field of natural language processing. The central theme draws specific attention towards addressing linguistic aspects ofmeaning, covering deep as well as shallow approaches to semantic processing. The contributions address both knowledgebased and data-driven methods for modelling and acquiring semantic information, and discuss the role of semantic information in applications of language technology. The articles demonstrate the importance of semantic processing, and present novel and creative approaches to natural language processing in general. Some contributions put their focus on developing and improving NLP systems for tasks like Named Entity Recognition or Word Sense Disambiguation, or focus on semantic knowledge acquisition and exploitation with respect to collaboratively built ressources, or harvesting semantic information in virtual games. Others are set within the context of real-world applications, such as Authoring Aids, Text Summarisation and Information Retrieval. The collection highlights the importance of semantic processing for different areas and applications in Natural Language Processing, and provides the reader with an overview of current research in this field

New Ethnicities and Language Use: Cultures of Hybridity in a Group of Adolescents of Mainly South Asian Descent in a London School in the Late 1990s

This thesis draws on anti-essentialist theorisations of ethnicity developed out of the British Cultural Studies tradition by authors such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy and others. Of particular interest are the notions of `new ethnicities', `cultures of hybridity' and `diaspora'. These concepts are used as the basis for an empirical study attempting to show how they might be realised at the level of ordinary everyday life. The research informants are a group of 30 male and female adolescents (The Blackhill youth) of mainly South Asian descent in a secondary school in the western suburbs of London. The thesis, using a variety of methods including a survey questionnaire, written accounts, informant-made audio recordings and individual conversational interviews, elicits their representations of their patterns of language use. These facilitate discussion and analysis of a complex tapestry of ethnicities which embrace not only language use, but also religion and popular culture. This investigation also demonstrates that if the study of ethnicity shifts its focus from a dependence on the visual (what people look like), to the aural (what they sound like), there is a basis for new understandings of how `new ethnicities' might develop. The thesis suggests that rather than looking for a binary distinction between old and new ethnicities it might be more productive to look for a synthesis of residual, dominant and emergent elements in culture. This leads to a conclusion that the most important element in the `cultures of hybridity' of the Blackhill youth is their Britishness which is integrated in intricate ways with both traditional and contemporary modes of being South Asian. Thereby, the emergence of distinctive Brasian identities is signalled

Quality of Life of Older People in Karachi, Pakistan

Introduction: There are several conceptualizations regarding the quality of life and what it means for individuals. This thesis takes a specific approach to examine the quality of life by examining the work of Maslow (1961), and Doyal, and Gough (1991), basic human needs. Doyal’s and Gough’s (1991) work operationalized through CASP-19 (Control, Autonomy, Self-realization, and Pleasure), a well-established and theoretically derived instrument to assess the quality of life in older adults in Karachi, Pakistan. Method: The cross-cultural survey was conducted to assess the quality of life of 50+ older adults in Karachi, Pakistan. Nearly 100 participants from each low, middle, and high-income areas were selected using cluster sampling. The rigorous method was used for cross-cultural adaptation of CASP 19 in Pakistani population, which included (translated from English to Urdu, back translation, pre-test the Urdu version). Results: The pilot-testing explored the language, cultural and conceptual similarities of the tool to the original version. Both focus groups confirmed that CASP-19 has conceptual relevance to Pakistani culture. However confirmatory analysis results show that CASP13 had a good model fit to use in Karachi, Pakistan. The regression analysis was used to model the association between the various predictors of quality of life, for example, the socio-demographic variables show that age does not show any effect on the quality of life, whereas gender inequality decreases the quality of life. While financial constraints in later life decrease the quality of life in Karachi, Pakistan. Conclusion: This thesis indicates that after appropriate analysis, CASP13 is a valid and reliable tool to assess the quality of life of 50+ older adults in Karachi. Moreover, study’s finding recommended the importance of developing policies at the state level within the government