A Study Of Quality Management In Small Organizations Providing Services Directed At People

This paper reports on a study of managerial perceptions of the implementation of total quality management (TQM). Results of a survey covering small firms in northeastern Indiana providing services directed at people are presented. Aspects discussed include the unique nature of this category of service firms, TQM deployment, tools used, successes, failures, benefits, and problems encountered. The majority of respondents indicated their firms’ commitment to TQM but a significantly smaller proportion demonstrated notable engagement with and actual implementation of a formal TQM program. Even smaller percentages had benchmarked internal quality standards, used TQM tools and quality-enhancing activities, rewarded employees for successful quality performance, and involved suppliers in their quality programs. Strategic implications of these findings are considered

Noncommutative vector bundles over fuzzy CP^N and their covariant derivatives

We generalise the construction of fuzzy CP^N in a manner that allows us to access all noncommutative equivariant complex vector bundles over this space. We give a simplified construction of polarization tensors on S^2 that generalizes to complex projective space, identify Laplacians and natural noncommutative covariant derivative operators that map between the modules that describe noncommuative sections. In the process we find a natural generalization of the Schwinger-Jordan construction to su(n) and identify composite oscillators that obey a Heisenberg algebra on an appropriate Fock space.Comment: 34 pages, v2 contains minor corrections to the published versio

A simple approach to the correlation of rotovibrational states in four-atomic molecules

The problem of correlation between quantum states of four-atomic molecules in different geometrical configurations is reviewed in detail. A general, still simple rule is obtained which allows one to correlate states of a linear four-atomic molecule with those of any kind of non-linear four-atomic molecule.Comment: 16 pages (+8 figures), Postscript (ready to print!

Nature of Sonoluminescence: Noble Gas Radiation Excited by Hot Electrons in "Cold" Water

We show that strong electric fields occurring in water near the surface of collapsing gas bubbles because of the flexoelectric effect can provoke dynamic electric breakdown in a micron-size region near the bubble and consider the scenario of the SBSL. The scenario is: (i) at the last stage of incomplete collapse of the bubble the gradient of pressure in water near the bubble surface has such a value and sign that the electric field arising from the flexoelectric effect exceeds the threshold field of the dynamic electrical breakdown of water and is directed to the bubble center; (ii) mobile electrons are generated because of thermal ionization of water molecules near the bubble surface; (iii) these electrons are accelerated in ''cold'' water by the strong electric fields; (iv) these hot electrons transfer noble gas atoms dissolved in water to high-energy excited states and optical transitions between these states produce SBSL UV flashes in the trasparency window of water; (v) the breakdown can be repeated several times and the power and duration of the UV flash are determined by the multiplicity of the breakdowns. The SBSL spectrum is found to resemble a black-body spectrum where temperature is given by the effective temperature of the hot electrons. The pulse energy and some other characteristics of the SBSL are found to be in agreement with the experimental data when realistic estimations are made.Comment: 11 pages (RevTex), 1 figure (.ps

Replacement of His23 by Cys in a zinc finger of HIV-1 NCp7 led to a change in 1H NMR-derived 3D structure and to a loss of biological activity

AbstractThe nucleocapsid protein NCp7 of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), which is necessary for the formation of infectious virions, contains two zinc fingers of the Cys-X2-Cys-X4-His-X4-Cys form. To elucidate the importance of this particular motif, well conserved in retroviruses and retroelements, we substituted the histidine residue by a cysteine in the first zinc binding domain 13VKCFNCGKEGHTARNCRA30. The structures of the mutated and native zinc complexed peptides were studied by two-dimensional 600 MHz 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in aqueous solution. The nuclear Overhauser effects were used as constraints to determine the solution structures using DIANA software followed by AMBER energy refinement. The results show that native and mutant peptides fold into non-identical three-dimensional structures, probably accounting for the loss of retrovirus infectivity following the His-Cys point mutation

Renormalization of composite operators

The blocked composite operators are defined in the one-component Euclidean scalar field theory, and shown to generate a linear transformation of the operators, the operator mixing. This transformation allows us to introduce the parallel transport of the operators along the RG trajectory. The connection on this one-dimensional manifold governs the scale evolution of the operator mixing. It is shown that the solution of the eigenvalue problem of the connection gives the various scaling regimes and the relevant operators there. The relation to perturbative renormalization is also discussed in the framework of the $\phi^3$ theory in dimension $d=6$.Comment: 24 pages, revtex (accepted by Phys. Rev. D), changes in introduction and summar

Investigation of controllable multi electrode based FES (functional electrical stimulation) system for restoration of grasp-preliminary study on healthy individuals

Functional electrical stimulation applied via surface electrode can be used for hand rehabilitation particularly for enabling grasp in patients with stroke or spinal cord injury. The use of multi-pad electrode and multi-channel electrical stimulator based improve the effectiveness of conventional FES. Such a system consists of a multi-pad surface electrode and a matching multi-channel stimulator. This system will allow the targeting of motor neurons which activate muscle groups to produce corresponding functional movements of the hand. This paper presents our study on normal subjects to quantify the movement resulting from stimulation of electrodes spatially distributed around the forearm. The device was tested on four healthy subjects and the results show that multi-pad electrode provide desired amount of selectivity and can be used for generating functional grasp. The results also show that the effect of stimulation varies from person to person reflecting inters subject anatomical variability