Awards recognizing quality in health care

A variety of awards have been recognizing business, public, and educational sectors for their quality efforts. As of 1995, 10 states include the health care sector in their programs. The national Malcolm Baldrige Award now accepts volunteer applications from the health care sector as a prelude to their inclusion in 1996 in the regular award program. An evaluation model is common to the several award programs that describes how quality is enabled, the systems that make it work, and the desired goals in seven categories. Each category has criteria that allow the flexibility desired by individual programs. The important features are the self-examination required of the organization in preparing the application and the feedback reports to all applicants that note the strengths of applicant and the areas for improvement by the applicant. Health care organizations are encouraged to participate in these award programs as part of their individual improvements efforts.     

New algorithms for k-center and extensions

The problem of interest is covering a given point set with homothetic copies of several convex containers C ₁,…,C _k , while the objective is to minimize the maximum over the dilatation factors. Such k-containment problems arise in various applications, e.g. in facility location, shape fitting, data classification or clustering. So far most attention has been paid to the special case of the Euclidean k-center problem, where all containers C _i are Euclidean unit balls. Recent developments based on so-called core-sets enable not only better theoretical bounds in the running time of approximation algorithms but also improvements in practically solvable input sizes. Here, we present some new geometric inequalities and a Mixed-Integer-Convex-Programming formulation. Both are used in a very effective branch-and-bound routine which not only improves on best known running times in the Euclidean case but also handles general and even different containers among the C _i .     

The Influence of Cost and Quality Priorities on the Propensity to Outsource Production*

Outsourcing of production has escalated over the past decade due to unprecedented competition and worldwide access to low‐cost labor markets. This article examines how cost and quality priorities—two key attributes of manufacturing strategy—influence a manufacturer's propensity to outsource. By doing so, we bridge the existing gap between research on manufacturing strategy and firm boundaries. We develop a theory‐based model that links a manufacturer's cost and quality priorities to its plans to outsource production. Our empirical analyses, based on survey data obtained from 867 manufacturing business units, control for firm‐specific factors previously shown to impact outsourcing, including asset specificity, uncertainty, and current capabilities in cost and quality. We found that the competitive priority placed on cost played an integral role in sourcing decisions, while, surprisingly, conformance quality priorities did not. The cost result is consistent with our expectations and observations in practice. The significant effect of cost priority on outsourcing shows that any theory of firm boundaries that fails to consider competitive priorities is incomplete. The finding regarding quality, which was counter to our expectations, may partially explain why there is an emergence of so many nonconforming products associated with outsourcing. Taken together, our results provide theoretical insights for future research into how manufacturing managers can improve their decision making on outsourcing production.     

两互穿电子注-等离子体互作用的相对性理论

由两个等密度、反向电子注与重背景离子互作用所产生的电子注-等离子体互作用已经在理论上和实验上进行了研究。与文献[1]和[2]不同,本文提出一个较少限制的模型来讨论此种互作用机理的特性.该模型简略地示于图1。应用扰动理论,将已有的非相对论性模型推广应用于相对论性电子注和相对论效应对电子注-等离子体互作用的影响。此外已有的模型是被限制于等速、反向电子注在重背景离子等离子体中的互作用。本文根据相对论效应把该模型推广应用于非等速、平行或不平行的两个电子注。这个广义的理论不仅明显地显示了相对论效应.而且便于与熟悉的器件和过程,诸如行波管、邦内曼(Buncman)不稳定性以及皮尔斯(Picrcc}不稳定性相比较。导出了相对论性色散方程,并从这一相对论性互作用出发提出了一种新型自由电子激光。