2,087 research outputs found
Upstream Volatility in the Supply Chain: The Machine Tool Industry as a Case Study
Working Draft, May 1995Cyclicality is a well known and accepted fact of life in market-driven
economies. Less well known or understood, however, is the phenomenon of
amplification as one looks "upstream" in the industrial supply chain. This
paper discusses and explains the amplification phenomenon and its
implications through the lens of one "upstream" industry that is notorious
for the intensity of the business cycles it faces: the machine tool industry.
Using a sparse simulation model, we have replicated much of the behavior
seen in the industrial world in which machine tool companies operate. This
model has allowed us to test and confirm many of our hypotheses. Two
results stand out. Even though machine tool builders can do little to reduce
their production volatility through choice of forecast rule, a longer view of
the future leads companies to retain more of their skilled workforce. This is
often cited as one of the advantages that European and Japanese companies
have enjoyed: lower skilled employee turnover. The second, and most
important result is that machine tool customers can do a great deal to reduce
the volatility for machine tool builders through their choice of order forecast
rule. Companies which use a longer horizon over which to forecast orders
tend to impose less of their own volatility upon their supply base.MIT -- Leaders for Manufacturing, the
International Motor Vehicle Program, the Industrial Performance Center, the International
Center for Research on the Management of Technology, and the Japan Program; Chrysler, Intel, Sematech, and Texas Instruments
Maximum solutions of normalized Ricci flows on 4-manifolds
We consider maximum solution , , to the normalized
Ricci flow. Among other things, we prove that, if is a smooth
compact symplectic 4-manifold such that and let
, be a solution to (1.3) on whose Ricci curvature
satisfies that and additionally , then there exists an , and a sequence of points
, , satisfying that, by passing to a
subsequence, , in the -pointed
Gromov-Hausdorff sense for any sequence , where
, , are complete complex hyperbolic orbifolds
of complex dimension 2 with at most finitely many isolated orbifold points.
Moreover, the convergence is in the non-singular part of
and
, where
(resp. ) is the Euler characteristic (resp. signature) of
.Comment: 23 page
Charge ordering in charge-compensated by oxonium ions
Charge ordering behavior is observed in the crystal prepared through the
immersion of the crystal in distilled water. Discovery of the
charge ordering in the crystal with Na content less than 0.5 indicates that the
immersion in water brings about the reduction of the
. The formal valence of Co changes from +3.59 estimated from
the
Na content to +3.5, the same as that in . The charge
compensation is confirmed to arise from the intercalation of the oxonium ions
as occurred in the superconducting sodium cobalt oxide
bilayer-hydrate.\cite{takada1}
The charge ordering is the same as that observed in . It
suggests that the Co valence of +3.5 is necessary for the charge ordering.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
Statistics of Lyapunov exponent in one-dimensional layered systems
Localization of acoustic waves in a one dimensional water duct containing
many randomly distributed air filled blocks is studied. Both the Lyapunov
exponent and its variance are computed. Their statistical properties are also
explored extensively. The results reveal that in this system the single
parameter scaling is generally inadequate no matter whether the frequency we
consider is located in a pass band or in a band gap. This contradicts the
earlier observations in an optical case. We compare the results with two
optical cases and give a possible explanation of the origin of the different
behaviors.Comment: 6 pages revtex file, 6 eps figure
Black holes as mirrors: quantum information in random subsystems
We study information retrieval from evaporating black holes, assuming that
the internal dynamics of a black hole is unitary and rapidly mixing, and
assuming that the retriever has unlimited control over the emitted Hawking
radiation. If the evaporation of the black hole has already proceeded past the
"half-way" point, where half of the initial entropy has been radiated away,
then additional quantum information deposited in the black hole is revealed in
the Hawking radiation very rapidly. Information deposited prior to the half-way
point remains concealed until the half-way point, and then emerges quickly.
These conclusions hold because typical local quantum circuits are efficient
encoders for quantum error-correcting codes that nearly achieve the capacity of
the quantum erasure channel. Our estimate of a black hole's information
retention time, based on speculative dynamical assumptions, is just barely
compatible with the black hole complementarity hypothesis.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures. (v2): discussion of decoding complexity
clarifie
The effect of the annealing temperature on the local distortion of LaCaMnO thin films
Mn -edge fluorescence data are presented for thin film samples (3000~\AA)
of Colossal Magnetoresistive (CMR) LaCaMnO: as-deposited,
and post-annealed at 1000 K and 1200 K. The local distortion is analyzed in
terms of three contributions: static, phonon, and an extra,
temperature-dependent, polaron term. The polaron distortion is very small for
the as-deposited sample and increases with the annealing temperature. In
contrast, the static distortion in the samples decreases with the annealing
temperature. Although the local structure of the as-deposited sample shows very
little temperature dependence, the change in resistivity with temperature is
the largest of these three thin film samples. The as-deposited sample also has
the highest magnetoresistance (MR), which indicates some other mechanism may
also contribute to the transport properties of CMR samples. We also discuss the
relationship between local distortion and the magnetization of the sample.Comment: 11 pages of Preprint format, 8 figures in one tar fil
Anomalous Normal-State Properties of High-T Superconductors -- Intrinsic Properties of Strongly Correlated Electron Systems?
A systematic study of optical and transport properties of the Hubbard model,
based on Metzner and Vollhardt's dynamical mean-field approximation, is
reviewed. This model shows interesting anomalous properties that are, in our
opinion, ubiquitous to single-band strongly correlated systems (for all spatial
dimensions greater than one), and also compare qualitatively with many
anomalous transport features of the high-T cuprates. This anomalous
behavior of the normal-state properties is traced to a ``collective single-band
Kondo effect,'' in which a quasiparticle resonance forms at the Fermi level as
the temperature is lowered, ultimately yielding a strongly renormalized Fermi
liquid at zero temperature.Comment: 27 pages, latex, 13 figures, Invited for publication in Advances in
Physic
Excisional treatment in women with cervical adenocarcinoma in situ (AIS): a prospective randomised controlled noninferiority trial to compare AIS persistence/recurrence after loop electrosurgical excision procedure with cold knife cone biopsy: protocol for a pilot study
Introduction: Adenocarcinoma in situ (AIS) of the uterine cervix is the precursor to invasive endocervical adenocarcinoma. An excisional biopsy such as a cold knife cone biopsy (CKC) should be performed to exclude invasive adenocarcinoma. Loop electrosurgical excision procedure (LEEP) is an alternative modality to CKC but is controversial in AIS. There is a perception that there is a greater likelihood of incomplete excision of AIS with LEEP because the depth of excised tissue tends to be smaller and the tissue margins may show thermal artefact which can interfere with pathology assessment. In the USA, guidelines recommend that any treatment modality can be used to excise AIS, provided that the specimen remains intact with interpretable margins. However, there are no high-quality studies comparing LEEP with CKC and well-designed prospective studies are needed. If such a study were to show that LEEP was non-inferior to CKC for the outcomes of post-treatment persistence, recurrence and adenocarcinoma, LEEP could be recommended as an appropriate treatment option for AIS in selected patients. This would benefit women because, unlike CKC, LEEP does not require general anaesthesia and may be associated with reduced morbidity.
Methods and analysis: The proposed exploratory study is a parallel group trial with an allocation ratio of 2:1 in favour of the intervention (LEEP: CKC). Participants are women aged ≥18 to ≤45 years diagnosed with AIS on cervical screening and/or colposcopically directed biopsy in Australia and New Zealand, who are to receive excisional treatment in a tertiary level centre.
Ethics and dissemination: Ethical approval for the study has been granted by the St John of God Healthcare Human Research Ethics Committee (reference number #1137)
Tight local approximation results for max-min linear programs
In a bipartite max-min LP, we are given a bipartite graph \myG = (V \cup I
\cup K, E), where each agent is adjacent to exactly one constraint
and exactly one objective . Each agent controls a
variable . For each we have a nonnegative linear constraint on
the variables of adjacent agents. For each we have a nonnegative
linear objective function of the variables of adjacent agents. The task is to
maximise the minimum of the objective functions. We study local algorithms
where each agent must choose based on input within its
constant-radius neighbourhood in \myG. We show that for every
there exists a local algorithm achieving the approximation ratio . We also show that this result is the best possible
-- no local algorithm can achieve the approximation ratio . Here is the maximum degree of a vertex , and
is the maximum degree of a vertex . As a methodological
contribution, we introduce the technique of graph unfolding for the design of
local approximation algorithms.Comment: 16 page
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