9,982 research outputs found
The financial impact of ISO 9000 certification in the United States: an empirical analysis.
The ISO 9000 series of quality management systems standards, introduced in 1986, has been adopted at over 560,000 locations worldwide. Anecdotal evidence suggests that firms can achieve internal benefits such as quality or productivity improvements or that certification can help firms maintain or increase their market share, or both. Others argue that the standard is too generic to cause performance improvement but can be seen as a signal of good management. In this paper, we track financial performance from 1987 to 1997 of all publicly traded ISO 9000 certified manufacturing firms in the United States with SIC codes 2000ā3999, and test whether ISO 9000 certification leads to productivity improvements, market benefits, and improved financial performance. We employ event-study methods, matching each certified firm to a control group of one or more noncertified firms in the same industry with similar precertification size and/or return on assets. We find that firmsā decision to seek their first ISO 9000 certification was indeed followed by significant abnormal improvements in financial performance, though the exact timing and magnitude of this effect depend on the specification of the control group. Three years after certification, the certified firms do display strongly significant abnormal performance under all control-group specifications. The degree to which the precise results vary across control-group specifications indicates that event studies should always include extensive sensitivity analysis, for instance matching by size and performance separately and jointly, using both single firms and portfolios as controls.ISO 9000; Quality management; Standards; Financial; Empirical; Event study; Compustat;
Automated Reconstruction of Particle Cascades in High Energy Physics Experiments
We present a procedure for reconstructing particle cascades from event data
measured in a high energy physics experiment. For evaluating the hypothesis of
a specific physics process causing the observed data, all possible
reconstruction versions of the scattering process are constructed from the
final state objects. We describe the procedure as well as examples of physics
processes of different complexity studied at hadron-hadron colliders. We
estimate the performance by 20 microseconds per reconstructed decay vertex, and
0.6 kByte per reconstructed particle in the decay trees.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures. Submitted to Computational Science & Discover
Inverse Scattering for Gratings and Wave Guides
We consider the problem of unique identification of dielectric coefficients
for gratings and sound speeds for wave guides from scattering data. We prove
that the "propagating modes" given for all frequencies uniquely determine these
coefficients. The gratings may contain conductors as well as dielectrics and
the boundaries of the conductors are also determined by the propagating modes.Comment: 12 page
Managing the Unmanageable: How IS Research Can Contribute to the Scholarship of Cyber Projects
Cyber projects are large-scale efforts to implement computer, information, and communication technologies in scientific communities. These projects seek to build scientific cyberinfrastructure that will promote new scientific collaborations and transform science in novel and unimagined ways. Their scope and complexity, the number and diversity of stakeholders, and their transformational goals make cyber projects extremely challenging to understand and manage. Consequently, scholars from multiple disciplines, including computer science, information science, sociology, and information systems, have begun to study cyber projects and their impacts. As IS scholars, our goal is to contribute to this growing body of inter-disciplinary knowledge by considering three areas of IS research that are particularly germane to this class of project, given their characteristics: development approaches, conflict, and success factors. After describing cyber projects, we explore how IS research findings in these three areas are relevant for cyber projects, and suggest promising avenues of future research. We conclude by discussing the importance and unique challenges of cyber projects and propose that, given our expertise and knowledge of project management, IS researchers are particularly well suited to contribute to the inter-disciplinary study of these projects
Concepts, Developments and Advanced Applications of the PAX Toolkit
The Physics Analysis eXpert (PAX) is an open source toolkit for high energy
physics analysis. The C++ class collection provided by PAX is deployed in a
number of analyses with complex event topologies at Tevatron and LHC. In this
article, we summarize basic concepts and class structure of the PAX kernel. We
report about the most recent developments of the kernel and introduce two new
PAX accessories. The PaxFactory, that provides a class collection to facilitate
event hypothesis evolution, and VisualPax, a Graphical User Interface for PAX
objects
From Poincare to affine invariance: How does the Dirac equation generalize?
A generalization of the Dirac equation to the case of affine symmetry, with
SL(4,R) replacing SO(1,3), is considered. A detailed analysis of a Dirac-type
Poincare-covariant equation for any spin j is carried out, and the related
general interlocking scheme fulfilling all physical requirements is
established. Embedding of the corresponding Lorentz fields into
infinite-component SL(4,R) fermionic fields, the constraints on the SL(4,R)
vector-operator generalizing Dirac's gamma matrices, as well as the minimal
coupling to (Metric-)Affine gravity are studied. Finally, a symmetry breaking
scenario for SA(4,R) is presented which preserves the Poincare symmetry.Comment: 34 pages, LaTeX2e, 8 figures, revised introduction, typos correcte
Spectra of Discrete Schr\"odinger Operators with Primitive Invertible Substitution Potentials
We study the spectral properties of discrete Schr\"odinger operators with
potentials given by primitive invertible substitution sequences (or by Sturmian
sequences whose rotation angle has an eventually periodic continued fraction
expansion, a strictly larger class than primitive invertible substitution
sequences). It is known that operators from this family have spectra which are
Cantor sets of zero Lebesgue measure. We show that the Hausdorff dimension of
this set tends to as coupling constant tends to . Moreover, we
also show that at small coupling constant, all gaps allowed by the gap labeling
theorem are open and furthermore open linearly with respect to .
Additionally, we show that, in the small coupling regime, the density of states
measure for an operator in this family is exact dimensional. The dimension of
the density of states measure is strictly smaller than the Hausdorff dimension
of the spectrum and tends to as tends to
- ā¦