Multi-objective machine-component grouping in cellular manufacturing: A genetic algorithm

The cellular manufacturing system (CMS) is an important group technology (GT) application. The first step of CMS design is cell formation, generally known as machinecell formation (MCF) or machine-component (MCG). A genetic algorithm (GA) is a robust adaptive optimization method based on principles of natural evolution and is appropriate for the MCG problem, which is an NP complete complex problem. In this study, we propose a GA-based procedure to solve the MCG problem. More specifically, this study aims to minimize (1) total cost, which includes intercell and intracell part transportation costs and machines investment cots; (2) intracell machine loading imbalance; and (3) intercell machine loading imbalance under many realistic considerations. An illustrative example and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of this procedure. The proposed procedure is extremely adaptive, flexible, efficient and can be used to solve real MCG problems in factories by providing robust manufacturing cell formation in a short execution time.     

Socioeconomic Status and Health Well-Being during Later Life: Potential Mediating Factors

This study explores the socioeconomic status (SES)-perceived health association, with special attention on living arrangements. It improves upon existing explanations of causal mechanisms underlying the impact of SES on health among the elderly. Using Health and Retirement Study to run ordered logistic regression, it addresses the importance of living arrangements for self-reported health. Income and education are both important predictors of self-reported health and that after controlling them, living arrangements also affect self-reported health. Future research should highlight nuanced measures of living arrangements and should explore longitudinal analyses to determine the long-term effects of these factors on self-reported health.     

NIMBY opposition and solid waste incinerator siting in democratizing Taiwan

To address Taiwan's waste crisis, the Taiwanese government has embraced incinerators as a major policy instrument for waste disposal. Although the adoption of waste burning policy was not debated much, the siting of incinerators has been vigorously opposed by community-based protest movements, emerged with Taiwan's transition to democracy. In response, both the Kuomintang (KMT) government and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government have used compensation to induce the acceptance of local hosting communities as in other countries. Nevertheless, the use of compensation has never been effective in resolving not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) conflict without mobilizing local political and government support to suppress NIMBY protests in order to enforce the timely construction of needed incinerators. To accommodate the rising democratic expectation of public participation in deliberations over the incineration waste policy, this article also argues that the role of citizen participation must be addressed to increase public support for incinerator option in managing Taiwan's waste.     

The History of Chinese Medicine in the People’s Republic of China and its Globalization

This introductory article provides an overview over the history of Chinese medicine, as it evolved in the People’s Republic of China over the last 60 years. In particular, it highlights how Traditional Chinese Medicine (zhongyi), as invented in the 1950s during a period of nationalism marked by idealism and pride in China’s ancient philosophy and cultural heritage, has evolved into a medicine that thrives on the contemporary global health market in a neoliberal climate. This latter form of Chinese medicine, which the author, in accordance with its Chinese promoters, calls zhongyiyao “Chinese medicine and pharmacotherapy,” has led to a further materialization of the once scholarly medical currents of Chinese medicine. However, as this volume will show, the globalization of Chinese medicine should not merely be considered in respect of those aspects that are being sold in those niches of society that offer a cure for bodily ailments but also in respect of those that—in accordance with the way Cartesian dualism has divided health care—are increasingly consumed as aspects of preventive medicine, namely taijiquan, and qigong.

Reports of past conferences

Since the advent of the People's Republic, the school has served as a metonym for the city in China, both in the public imagination and in state policy. This article explores how two different ideologies (socialist and post‐socialist) were manifested in two different visual images of the city and school, which in turn shaped the urban institutions and landscapes. In the socialist era, party‐state propaganda offered an image of a model society which was predominantly rural, and where formal education had been marginalized by alternative forms of learning. Cities and schools were understood to be dangerous repositories of bourgeois capitalism which must be scoured of their elitist and decadent characteristics through the importation of rural practices and values. In the post‐socialist era, the city is now envisioned as the centre of modernity and progress, and schools are seen as the path to development and ‘quality’ (suzhi). The rural is pathologized as backward. This new ideology has reshaped the Chinese urban educational landscape from one of enforced egalitarianism to one characterized by inequality and exclusion.     

Political Narratives and the Production of Legitimacy: The Case of Corruption in Post-Mao China

China watchers have predicted that corruption would lead to a crisis for the ruling regime. Instead, the Chinese Communist Party has somehow managed to retain and even strengthen its political legitimacy. This article analyzes corruption not as a crime or a political problem but as a topic of political narratives, thereby revealing the political processes which led to this result. This study, based on interviews and archival data, examines narratives on the topic of corruption produced in the post-Mao era by the ruling regime and political dissidents in their struggle to influence the populace's views on political legitimacy. In the 1980s, disgruntled intellectuals drew upon the traditionalist collective narrative of corruption to teach citizens to blame the leadership and the structure of the government for social problems, essentially rewriting the narratives used to assess and judge the regime. In doing so, they successfully threatened the political authority of the Party-state. However, in the 1990s, China's leaders and the official media revised the story of corruption so that the Party-state battled corruption on behalf of its citizens in order to bring them economic opportunities, rising living standards, and social stability. In these new narratives, the role of the state was no longer that of ideological or moral leadership, but of economic management. Through these narratives of economic management, the regime managed to control the corruption crisis and recapture its political legitimacy, but was also forced to deal with the consequences of this new vision of state-society relations.     

Bayesian single-arm phase II trial designs with time-to-event endpoints

For the cancer clinical trials with immunotherapy and molecularly targeted therapy, time-to-event endpoint is often a desired endpoint. In this paper, we present an event-driven approach for Bayesian one-stage and two-stage single-arm phase II trial designs. Two versions of Bayesian one-stage designs were proposed with executable algorithms and meanwhile, we also develop theoretical relationships between the frequentist and Bayesian designs. These findings help investigators who want to design a trial using Bayesian approach have an explicit understanding of how the frequentist properties can be achieved. Moreover, the proposed Bayesian designs using the exact posterior distributions accommodate the single-arm phase II trials with small sample sizes. We also proposed an optimal two-stage approach, which can be regarded as an extension of Simon's two-stage design with the time-to-event endpoint. Comprehensive simulations were conducted to explore the frequentist properties of the proposed Bayesian designs and an R package BayesDesign can be assessed via R CRAN for convenient use of the proposed methods.     

Phase II statistical process control for functional data

In the manufacturing process, a sequence of measurements of quality characteristic is increasingly taken across some continuum, producing a curve that represents the quality of the item. This curve provides the so-called profile or functional data. Regardless of a linear or nonlinear profile, the common approaches of the control chart are based on the multivariate control chart by monitoring the estimated parameter of the pre-defined linear or nonlinear model. Usually, the model is difficult to know practically, and it is also difficult to identify the abnormal pattern from the outlying parameter. The functional data control chart we propose can provide a better solution to these problems. In the Monte-Carlo simulations, we show that the functional data control chart is sensitive when the underlying process status is changed. By applying the vertical density profile data, the new method exhibits a good performance.     

A Selection Procedure for the Number of Signals in Presence of Colored Noise

Ranking and selection theory is used to estimate the number of signals present in colored noise. The data structure follows the well-known MUSIC (MUltiple SIgnal Classification) model. We deal with the eigenvalues of a covariance matrix, using the MUSIC model and colored noise. The data matrix can be written as the product of two matrices. The first matrix is the sample covariance matrix of the observed vectors. The second matrix is the inverse of the sample covariance matrix of reference vectors. We propose a multi-step selection procedure to construct a confidence interval on the number of signals present in a data set. Properties of this procedure will be stated and proved. Those properties will be used to compute the required parameters (procedure constants). Numerical examples are given to illustrate our theory.