Suzi and Mr. S.: Gender role stereotyping in social workers' court reports in custody and access cases.

This paper analyzes the “gender strategies” of a sample of Israeli women social workers as evidenced in the recommendations that they write for the courts on custody and visiting rights for divorcing couples. Textual analysis of these reports reveals what Hochchild terms a “traditional gender strategy,” manifested in a consistent pattern of gender stereotyping. There are clear differences in the way the social workers present the husband and wife as persons, both separately and in relation to one another, and in the roles that they expect them to fulfill, with the man being assigned the provider role and the woman the parent role. Even the way they collect information about the two parents' relationships with their children is different. The paper concludes with a discussion of the practical implications of the findings.     

A study of DEA models without explicit inputs

In performance evaluations, data without explicit inputs (such as index data, pure output data) are widely used. To directly use such data, this paper presents a study on building DEA models without explicit inputs, so-called DEA-WEI models, which are applicable to the evaluation applications where inputs are not directly considered. We provide an axiom foundation of these kinds of models, and further discuss how to incorporate value judgments of decision makers into these DEA-WEI models. Several such models are derived. Finally, applications of the DEA-WEI models are presented.     

Psychoanalysis and Politics Juliet Mitchell,Then and Now

Feminism and psychoanalysis have been in constant dialogue over the last four decades, and Juliet Mitchell has played a critical role in instigating and shaping that conversation. Yet her own work incorporates some of the most contentious aspects of it. Here I explore her latest book, Madmen and Medusas, to reflect upon why the relationship between her work and that dialogue remains so troubled. This exploration enables me to consider, once more, the contrasts between psychoanalytic perspectives that focus upon kinship, ideology, and symbolic structures and those which stress the historical contingency of gender categories.     

Shop floor control system for tool rooms

A shop floor control system (SFCS), which is the most important component of any production control system, ff has a direct e ect on the productivity of a tool room. The SFCS presented in this paper aims at streamlining various tool room activities, such as process planning, operations scheduling, loading, progress monitoring, and performance monitoring. The system discussed in this paper is characterized by simplicity and is user friendly. Basic information, consisting of three types of information (order details, process details, and part details), is input through interactive dialogue sessions. On-line updating of the process information is carried out, again through interactive dialogue sessions. The basic input to the system along with the on-line updating enables a number of useful and important reports and documents to be generated ff by the system for e ective control of the shop floor. The reports generated include operations scheduling, process sheet, part list, ffi job card, load pending report, e ciency report, etc. This SFCS is developed for a medium sized tool room in an automotive company and its successful implemention reduced paperwork and improved resource management and has resulted in productivity. It can be said that this system offers a first venture into computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) for a tool room.     

Multi-objectives exception management model for semiconductor back-end environment under turnkey service

On-time delivery is the need for customer satisfaction which is a critical factor in the survival of the semiconductor industry. The on-time-delivery performance of the whole semiconductor turnkey service depends on the performance of the back-end factories. Unfortunately, undesirable and inevitable production variations make it difficult to maintain and improve a factory's performance and more objectives such as cycle time, throughput rate and the due-date accuracy need to be simultaneously considered. This paper presents an exception management model in order to compromise the contradicting needs of delivery accuracy, throughput rate and cycle time. The exception model can be divided into three parts: (1) an integrated performance index is proposed to compromise multiple performance measures; (2) an AWDL (available WIP deviation level) determination model is designed to gather proper AWDLs for triggering exceptions and (3) a WIP correction action is proposed to make abnormal WIP levels back to normal levels as soon as possible. To evaluate the proposed WIP exception management model, a simulation model is constructed and experiments are then conducted. The simulation results show that the proposed model helps back-end factories to set proper exception triggering conditions, reduce uncertainty occurrences and achieve better performances on due dates.     

Stakeholders’ Perspective on Ecological Modeling in Environmental Risk Assessment of Pesticides: Challenges and Opportunities

The article closely examines the role of mechanistic effect models (e.g., population models) in the European environmental risk assessment (ERA) of pesticides. We studied perspectives of three stakeholder groups on population modeling in ERA of pesticides. Forty‐three in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews were conducted with stakeholders from regulatory authorities, industry, and academia all over Europe. The key informant approach was employed in recruiting our participants. They were first identified as key stakeholders in the field and then sampled by means of a purposive sampling, where each stakeholder identified as important by others was interviewed and asked to suggest another potential participant for our study. Our results show that participants, although having different institutional backgrounds often presented similar perspectives and concerns about modeling. Analysis of repeating ideas and keywords revealed that all stakeholders had very high and often contradicting expectations from models. Still, all three groups expected effect models to become integrated in future ERA of pesticides. Main hopes associated with effect models were to reduce the amount of expensive and complex testing and field monitoring, both at the product development stage, and as an aid to develop mitigation measures. Our analysis suggests that, although the needs of stakeholders often overlapped, subtle differences and lack of trust hinder the process of introducing mechanistic effect models into ERA.