An integrated TQM approach for the development of medium size organisations.

TQM is seen to be a key ingredient in the working of some of the most successful companies in the world. Awards for these companies include 'The Deming Award' in Japan, 'The Baldrige Award' in America, the 'EFQM Award' in Europe, and the UK has also recently launched 'The U.K. Quality Award'. This thesis serves to lay a foundation for investigating quality in medium size organisations; where, with management understanding, there is potential to comprehensively implement such strategies and thereby enhance those organisations.In this thesis I have considered TECs as medium-size organisations. In order to develop a TQM approach for TECs I have considered a number of TQM authorities and compared their principles with the European Quality Award (EQA) model in order to develop a model suitable for TECs.In the process of this comparison work it was realised that the EQA model was too complex for this particular application. Hence, I have developed a simpler TQM model which also incorporates all the characteristics of the EQA model.With the help of this model and personal interviews, data was gathered in order to test the suitability of the model and to identify critical success factors with medium-size organisations.The results, in general, indicate that there is a high calibre of management and staff, within the organisations visited, but with little understanding of TQM concepts. However, there were examples of 'good practice' and strong processes. Recommendations are set out detailing the kind of quality strategies medium-size organisations could adopt to enhance their effectiveness

Dense and accurate motion and strain estimation in high resolution speckle images using an image-adaptive approach

Digital image processing methods represent a viable and well acknowledged alternative to strain gauges and interferometric techniques for determining full-field displacements and strains in materials under stress. This paper presents an image adaptive technique for dense motion and strain estimation using high-resolution speckle images that show the analyzed material in its original and deformed states. The algorithm starts by dividing the speckle image showing the original state into irregular cells taking into consideration both spatial and gradient image information present. Subsequently the Newton-Raphson digital image correlation technique is applied to calculate the corresponding motion for each cell. Adaptive spatial regularization in the form of the Geman-McClure robust spatial estimator is employed to increase the spatial consistency of the motion components of a cell with respect to the components of neighbouring cells. To obtain the final strain information, local least-squares fitting using a linear displacement model is performed on the horizontal and vertical displacement fields. To evaluate the presented image partitioning and strain estimation techniques two numerical and two real experiments are employed. The numerical experiments simulate the deformation of a specimen with constant strain across the surface as well as small rigid-body rotations present while real experiments consist specimens that undergo uniaxial stress. The results indicate very good accuracy of the recovered strains as well as better rotation insensitivity compared to classical techniques

The Underlying Event at the LHC

We discuss a study of "minimum-bias'' collisions and the "Underlying Event" at CMS (under nominal conditions) by measuring charged particles and muons. The Underlying Event is studied by examining charged particles in the "transverse" region in charged particle jet production and in the central region of Drell-Yan muon-pair production (after removing the muon-pair)

Student access to the curriculum in an age of performativity and accountability: an examination of policy enactment

The curriculum is often the target of reform and governments use a range of accountability measures to ensure compliance. This paper examines the decisions schools in England make regarding history provision, in a period of curriculum change, and the potential consequences of these decisions. Drawing on a large, longitudinal data set, of primary and secondary material, the study examines the relationship between the number of students entered for public examination in history in England and a range of situated and material factors (Braun, Maguire and Ball, 2010). The data suggest that particular measures of accountability are effective in shaping school decision-making, but the type of school, socio-economic nature of the school intake, and students’ prior attainment are also important factors in understanding the decisions made. This does result in an inequitable access to history education; this inequity exists between different types of schools and socio-economic areas, and is also evident within schools where students with low prior attainment are less likely to be allowed to study history

Biogeographic ranges do not support niche theory in radiating Canary Island plant clades

Aim: Ecological niche concepts, in combination with biogeographic history, underlie our understanding of biogeographic ranges. Two pillars of this understanding are competitive displacement and niche conservatism. The competitive displacement hypothesis holds that very similar (e.g. closely related) co-occurring species should diverge, forced apart by competition. In contrast, according to the niche conservatism hypothesis, closely related species should have similar niches. If these are fundamental structuring forces, they should be detectable when comparing the climatic niches of endemic species in radiating clades in oceanic archipelagos, where closely related species exist in both sympatry and allopatry and the species' entire ranges are known. We took advantage of this natural experimental system to test whether the climatic niche relationships predicted by the two hypotheses are found. Location: Canary Islands. Methods: For the plant clades Aeonium, Argyranthemum, Descurainia, Echium, Lotus and Sonchus, separately, we tested relationships between phylogenetic distance and climatic niche differentiation (in temperature, precipitation and their combination), using a high-resolution dataset. We also tested for niche conservatism using Blomberg's K and Pagel's λ. We compared climatic niche differentiation between pairs of species existing in sympatry with that for pairs of species in allopatry. For each comparison, we focused on the climatic niche space available to both species. Results: The relationships between phylogenetic distance and climatic niche differentiation were mostly non-significant; some weak but significant positive relationships were found, mainly for Aeonium and Sonchus. Where differences between sympatry and allopatry were found, niche differentiation tended to be greater in allopatry. Main conclusions: The expectations from niche conservatism were frequently not met; instead our results suggest considerable climatic niche lability. All significant differences in climatic niche differentiation were opposite to the predictions from competitive displacement. These forces may be less important in structuring biogeographic ranges than is commonly thought, at least on islands

A novel dendroecological method finds a non-linear relationship between elevation and seasonal growth continuity on an island with trade wind-influenced water availability

Climatic seasonality drives ecosystem processes (e.g. productivity) and influences plant species distribution. However, it is poorly understood how different aspects of seasonality (esp. regarding temperature and precipitation) affect growth continuity of trees in climates with low seasonality because seasonality is often only crudely measured. On islands, exceptionally wide elevational species distribution ranges allow the use of tree rings to identify how growth continuity and climate–growth relationships change with elevation. Here we present a novel dendroecological method to measure stem growth continuity based on annual density fluctuations (ADFs) in tree rings of Pinus canariensis to indicate low climatic seasonality. The species ranges from 300 to more than 2000 m a.s.l. on the trade wind-influenced island of La Palma (Canary Islands), where we measured three decades of tree-ring data of 100 individuals distributed over ten sites along the entire elevational range. The successfully implemented ADF approach revealed a major shift of stem growth continuity across the elevational gradient. In a remarkably clear pattern, stem growth continuity (percentage of ADFs) showed a hump-shaped relationship with elevation reaching a maximum at around 1000 m a.s.l.. Low- to mid-elevation tree growth was positively correlated with the Palmer Drought Severity Index PDSI (indicating aridity) and sea surface temperature (indicating trade wind-influenced moderation of water supply), while high elevation tree growth was positively correlated with winter temperature (indicating a cold induced dormancy period). We conclude that ADFs are a useful method to measure stem growth continuity in low-seasonality climates. Growth of Pinus canariensis on the Canary Islands is more frequently interrupted by winter cold at high elevations and by summer drought at low elevations than in the trade wind-influenced mid elevations, where growth sometimes continues throughout the year. Climate change-associated alterations in trade wind cloud formation might cause non-analogue growth limitations for many unique island species