TOURING A SUPPLY CHAIN WITH STUDENTS: PEDAGOGICAL AND PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS

This paper describes the supply chain tour, an expansion of the widely used facility tour pedagogy. A supply chain tour is a tour of facilities sequentially related in the creation of value that is designed to expose critical linkages and illustrate Supply Chain Management concepts and theories. Effectively using the supply chain tour pedagogy requires the instructor to create a standardized approach to managing the facility tour; a checklist is provided for this purpose. An example supply chain tour, used in the author's classes, is described.     

The impact of government policy on technology transfer: an aircraft industry case study

This case study explores the interaction between domestic and foreign governmental policy on technology transfer with the goal of exploring the long-term impacts of technology transfer. Specifically, the impact of successive licensing of fighter aircraft manufacturing and design to Japan in the development of Japan’s aircraft industry is reviewed. Results indicate Japan has built a domestic aircraft industry through sequential learning with foreign technology transfers from the United States, and design and production on domestic fighter aircraft. This process was facilitated by governmental policies in both Japan and the United States.     

Use and misuse of levels of analysis in leadership research: An illustrative review of leader–member exchange

Prior reviews have focused on if leadership literature pays homage to levels of analysis; our purpose is to take stock of how well and in what ways levels issues are implemented in theory and hypotheses formulation, construct conceptualization, measurement, and data analysis. To illustrate these notions, we provide an in-depth review of 163 multi-level empirical leader–member exchange (LMX) and vertical dyad linkage (VDL) studies published between 1972 and 2012. Our findings indicate that the volume of multi-level studies in LMX has drastically increased recently and the majority of these studies cast theory and hypotheses at the same level. With regard to alignment of levels of theory/hypotheses with measurement and with data analyses, however, roughly one out of two published studies suffers from misalignment of levels. Most of this misalignment occurs in studies where the dyad level of analysis, a key component of LMX, is an explicit or implicit focus. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for the LMX literature, and present recommendations to guide multi-level leadership research.     

Workload Control and Order Release: A Lean Solution for Make‐to‐Order Companies

Protecting throughput from variance is the key to achieving lean. Workload control (WLC) accomplishes this in complex make‐to‐order job shops by controlling lead times, capacity, and work‐in‐process (WIP). However, the concept has been dismissed by many authors who believe its order release mechanism reduces the effectiveness of shop floor dispatching and increases work center idleness, thereby also increasing job tardiness results. We show that these problems have been overcome. A WLC order release method known as “LUMS OR” (Lancaster University Management School order release) combines continuous with periodic release, allowing the release of work to be triggered between periodic releases if a work center is starving. This paper refines the method based on the literature (creating “LUMS COR” [Lancaster University Management School corrected order release]) before comparing its performance against the best‐performing purely periodic and continuous release rules across a range of flow directions, from the pure job shop to the general flow shop. Results demonstrate that LUMS COR and the continuous WLC release methods consistently outperform purely periodic release and Constant WIP. LUMS COR is considered the best solution in practice due to its excellent performance and ease of implementation. Findings have significant implications for research and practice: throughput times and job tardiness results can be improved simultaneously and order release and dispatching rules can complement each other. Thus, WLC represents an effective means of implementing lean principles in a make‐to‐order context.     

Life: what is the chance that we are alone?

The Earth is full of life. If life evolved here, why not elsewhere? The Universe is a big place and our galaxy has many stars with planets. So are we alone? What is out there? And how do we know? Mark Burchell looks at the probability of life beyond our planet.     

CORE (Cost of Resource Exchange) Standard

This article describes the CORE (Cost of Resource Exchange) standard. CORE defines an XML schema to allow the exchange of financial information relating to library resources among library systems.     

Nonlinear voxel-based modelling of the haemodynamic response in fMRI

A common assumption for data analysis in functional magnetic resonance imaging is that the response signal can be modelled as the convolution of a haemodynamic response (HDR) kernel with a stimulus reference function. Early approaches modelled spatially constant HDR kernels, but more recently spatially varying models have been proposed. However, convolution limits the flexibility of these models and their ability to capture spatial variation. Here, a range of (nonlinear) parametric curves are fitted by least squares minimisation directly to individual voxel HDRs (i.e., without using convolution). A ‘constrained gamma curve’ is proposed as an efficient form for fitting the HDR at each individual voxel. This curve allows for spatial variation in the delay of the HDR, but places a global constraint on the temporal spread. The approach of directly fitting individual parameters of HDR shape is demonstrated to lead to an improved fit of response estimates.     

Adaptive modelling of dose–response relationships using smoothing splines

We consider the use of smoothing splines for the adaptive modelling of dose–response relationships. A smoothing spline is a nonparametric estimator of a function that is a compromise between the fit to the data and the degree of smoothness and thus provides a flexible way of modelling dose–response data. In conjunction with decision rules for which doses to continue with after an interim analysis, it can be used to give an adaptive way of modelling the relationship between dose and response. We fit smoothing splines using the generalized cross‐validation criterion for deciding on the degree of smoothness and we use estimated bootstrap percentiles of the predicted values for each dose to decide upon which doses to continue with after an interim analysis. We compare this approach with a corresponding adaptive analysis of variance approach based upon new simulations of the scenarios previously used by the PhRMA Working Group on Adaptive Dose‐Ranging Studies. The results obtained for the adaptive modelling of dose–response data using smoothing splines are mostly comparable with those previously obtained by the PhRMA Working Group for the Bayesian Normal Dynamic Linear model (GADA) procedure. These methods may be useful for carrying out adaptations, detecting dose–response relationships and identifying clinically relevant doses. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Geodesic Monte Carlo on Embedded Manifolds

Markov chain Monte Carlo methods explicitly defined on the manifold of probability distributions have recently been established. These methods are constructed from diffusions across the manifold and the solution of the equations describing geodesic flows in the Hamilton–Jacobi representation. This paper takes the differential geometric basis of Markov chain Monte Carlo further by considering methods to simulate from probability distributions that themselves are defined on a manifold, with common examples being classes of distributions describing directional statistics. Proposal mechanisms are developed based on the geodesic flows over the manifolds of support for the distributions, and illustrative examples are provided for the hypersphere and Stiefel manifold of orthonormal matrices.